Margaret Duarte

Visionary Fiction

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Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2011

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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  • Unpublished novel manuscripts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 : 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.

About Margaret Duarte

Former middle school teacher, Margaret Duarte, lives on a California dairy farm with a herd of “happy cows,” a constant reminder that the greenest pastures lie closest to home. Margaret earned her creative writing certificate through UC Davis Extension and has since published four novels in her “Enter the Between” visionary fiction series: Between Will and Surrender, Between Darkness and Dawn, Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, and Between Now and Forever. Her poem and story credits include SPC Tule Review; The California Writers Club Literary Review; finalist in the 2017 SLO Nightwriters Golden Quill Writing Contest; First Place winner for fiction in 2016, Second Place winner for fiction in 2018, Honorable Mention for fiction in 2019, and Gold winner for fiction in 2020 NORTHERN CALIFORNIA PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS Book Awards Competition; 2019 California Author Project winner for adult fiction.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. MBee says

    I am working on my pitch so I can enter. It's haaaard to condense down to 300 words! I've been reading through the pitch thread as well. It's interesting to see what others are writing about.

  2. Margaret Duarte says

    Hi MBee. Writing that pitch is one of the hardest parts of the contest. It's what's holding me back from entering a second of my novels right now. Oh well, one is a start. Following the threads on the discussion board are a great help during the contest. Good luck!

  3. MBee says

    Thanks! For some reason, I find it hard to explain what goes on in my novel. Not that I don't know what happens but to explain it without giving away important parts is what's so difficult!

  4. L. A. Lopez says

    Okay, this will be the third time I've tried to post. So my post should be pretty good by now, after the third try!!
    What I was saying, writing a pitch is probably the hardest thing a author has to do. No matter how many times you do it, it doesn't get any easier.
    The idea is get the story into a short couple of paragraphs, make it interesting enough so the reader goes right to the pages, and skips the rest of the pitch…Not an easy task.

  5. Margaret Duarte says

    MBee. It might help to read a post I did, called The Synopsis. Yikes! You will find it in the side bar of my blog. I sort of break down how to find the major plot points (3-5) of your story (you don't need to, and shouldn't include more at this point). Hope this helps.

  6. Margaret Duarte says

    Thanks, Lee. Three trys! Well, I'm glad you kept trying because your comment is a valuable one. Getting your story into a short couple of paragraphs means not including the whole thing, just the main story thread–plot points for genre and/or major character changes (for literary?). And to top it all off, you must do this in an interesting way. But that's what we have to do each time we send a query letter to an agent. Entering this contest is a great way to prepare for the submission process, one of the reasons I'm entering again this year.