Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2011

Recently, Amazon and Penguin Group (USA) announced the fourth annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, an international competition seeking fresh new writing voices. CreateSpace will once again host the submission platform for the contest.

Here is the information the competition emailed me as a past participant.

Important details about the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award:

What are the prizes?

Two Grand Prize winners, one in each of our two categories, will receive a full publishing contract with Penguin including a $15,000 advance

What categories are being accepted?

This year, the contest features two categories: General Fiction and Young Adult Fiction

What type of works are eligible?

• Unpublished novel manuscripts
• Self-published novels

When can I enter?

The submission period begins 1/24/11 and ends 2/6/11, or when the first 5,000 entries have been received in each category, whichever comes first

Entry Checklist

• Pitch: 300 words or less
• Excerpt: The first 3,000 - 5,000 words of your novel
• Final manuscript: 50,000 to 150,000 words
• Information about your book
• Personal contact information

What should I do now?

1. Prepare your entry: Visit http://www.createspace.com/abna and review the submission guidelines, helpful tutorials, and official contest rules.
2. Sign up to receive contest notifications with helpful tools and tips for preparing your entry.
3. Connect with other authors and discuss the contest.

Below are two posts I wrote about my experiences with the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest in 2010.

1. Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award
2. Publishers Weekly Review

For complete information go to Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

There you will find information on:

• Contest FAQ
• Contest Rules
• How to Enter
• Key Dates
• Prizes
• Sponsors

Plus:

• 2011 Expert Panelists
• Past ABNA winners

The ABNA Discussion Board is also up and running and will continue throughout the contest.  It's quite interesting to follow the discussion after you've entered to see what your competitors are up to.  Current subjects include, "The Pitch Thread--2011" and "Critiquing Exerpts."

This a contest definitely worth your consideration.

Good luck.

Publishers Weekly Review

On May 3, I received the prize for making it to the quarter-finalists in the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest (www.amazon.com/abna).

A Publishers Weekly Review. 

And it didn't disappoint.

Don't get me wrong.  Part of me hoped for a miracle, that the PW reviewer would say my novel was "best seller" material and that I was the next Jodi Picoult.  But the rational part of me knew that my novel still needed work.  I just didn't know exactly where.

Now I do.

I won't bore you with the details.  I'm sure you've seen PW reviews before. 

When you click on a book at Amazon.com and scroll down, you'll likely find an Amazon.com review and a Publisher's Weekly review.  And, believe me, the PW reviewers don't hold back their punches.  If you check the PW review for Jodi Picoult's House Rules, for instance, you'll get a taste of how tough they are.

Following are a few passages I plucked from the review:

"...Picoult has a rough time in this Picoult-esque blend of medical and courtroom drama that lacks her usual storytelling finesse."
"The whodunit is stretched sit-com thin and handled poorly..."
"...the wobbly plotting is a massive detriment..."

And this about a master!

Guess my review wasn't so bad after all.

Anyway, it's not a PW reviewer's job to line-edit or nitpick about sentence structure, but to give an overall impression of the work.  They'll overlook a few spelling and punctuation errors, but they won't tolerate a bad story.  And the things my reviewer mentioned are ones I can--and will--fix before querying an agent. 

Thank goodness I found out on time.

If you go to www.Amazon.com/abna and scroll down to the Discussion Board, you'll see some of the quarter-finalist's reactions to their PW reviews.

What some of the them overlook is that handling criticism is part of the process.  Getting a PW review is huge.  Nasty or not.  It's best to put it aside for a few days and then go back and re-read it later.  I'm grateful that a PW reviewer pinpointed exactly where my novel needs work.  I'm letting the information ferment for awhile and hope my subconscious will come up with some solutions.

And will I enter the contest again next year?  You betcha.  But with a different novel this time.  This contest gave me hope and a mission during the three months I was a contender.  And I learned a lot.  I have a good pitch.  I have two good opening chapters.  And I need to get back to work.

Someday I look forward to another  Publisher Weekly Review and hope it will come closer to declaring my novel a darn good read.

How good is that?