If you’re a budding author or have self-published recently, I’m sure you’ve heard about this, but here it is anyway. For the past six years, Amazon has hosted the Breakthrough Novel Awards, giving non-traditionally-published authors a chance to win a $50,000 advance and a contract with their in-house publishing branch. Four first prize winners in each genre will get $15,000 bucks and a similar deal.
It’s a very competitive thing, with thousands of entries every year and several rounds to conquer. You’ll need a 300 word pitch for the first round, then a 3000 to 5000 word excerpt for round two, and the whole enchilada if you pass the preliminaries. Actual Amazon customers will vote on the finalists, and the entry with the most votes scores the grand prize.
Entries are accepted for general fiction, romance, mystery/thriller, speculative fiction (scifi, fantasy, horror), and YA. The upper limit is 150,000 words, which means I’m pretty much scuppered. You do need to have a CreateSpace account in order to enter, but that’s free and pretty easy to set up. You DON’T need to have a published CreateSpace project. Here are the official rules, if you’re interested.
You can enter from this very moment until January 27th. I’m going to skip it, I think, because I’ve got other things on the horizon for The Last Death, but if anyone is planning to enter, I wish you the best of luck!
Jennifer bresnick.com 