Well, it's only a small step but I entered a novel in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest and it made the first round cut. The book is called Turnabout, and I tried entering it in the YA category last year and didn't make the cut. I honed the blurb (the first round is judged solely on the 300-word blurb) and switched to the science fiction ( Read more... )

The third season of American Author- oops, I mean the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest- is now at the quarterfinal stage. Amazon's contest is unusual in that it includes a public vote at the end (rather like a reality show), and because it specifies the book must be unpublished, not the author. I've entered twice. I washed out the first ( Read more... )

The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest is often compared to American Idol, but of course ABNA isn't nearly as famous, and the judges are entirely anonymous. Now, however, the judges are YOU! Amazon has announced the three finalists and opened the voting. The reading public (well, those with an Amazon account, in any event) will pick the ( Read more... )

A message on the Pikes Peak Writers list serve mentioned an interesting contest (click the options on the left for more info). For one thing, it's strictly for science fiction (and it sounds like that means true science fiction, not fantasy or alternate history, or any related genre. For a second thing, it's for novella-length fiction (the length ( Read more... )

Amazon has opened submissions on the second season of Amazon Idol-I mean, the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The deal is, the winner gets published by Penguin, but last year there were actually three or four contracts that came out of the contest ( Read more... )

Authonomy sent me an e-mail that there were adding some social-network like new features. This reminded me I had never gone back to check out their site after I blogged about it a while ago.

Well, it's interesting. It's a lot like the Online Writing Workshop for Fantasy and Horror when it first started out under Del Rey-writers critiquing and ( Read more... )

I saw an announcement on the Pikes Peak Writers list serve that Bantam Spectra is running a contest for unpublished writers (their website calls it their "first annual" short fiction contest). If you can write a good spec fic story that's 2,000 words or under, you have until January 31, 2009 to submit it to them. Go here for the complete rules, ( Read more... )

I've said before that on some level, the phrase "One picture is worth a thousand words" bothers me. I write words, after all. That said, a totally cool post is this one from Creativity. They had a joint project with Penguin Books, basically an art contest, where they asked a boatload of artists (300 is a boatload, right?) to create a cover design ( Read more... )

Amazon has announced the winner of their Breakthrough Novel Award contest. The winning writer is a bartender who now lives in New Orleans, and the protagonist of his novel is a bartender from Staten Island. I guess it really does pay to write what you know! I'm happy a genre novel (it was listed in the mystery category) won, but a tad cheesed at ( Read more... )

I got an e-mail from Amazon about the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award ( Read more... )