Tag Archives: Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest: Did you make the first cut?

Posted on February 16, 2013 | 29 comments

The top 400 pitches in each category have been listed.  Did you make the cut?

I didn’t recognize anyone on the YA list, but congrats to everyone who made it.  I wish you the best of luck.

And, yes, that means that my name was NOT on the list.

Am I upset?  Honestly, not really.

The only thing I could really be upset about is that I stopped doing what I SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING and spent two weeks polishing my manuscript, rewriting the beginning, and writing an (unsuccessful) pitch.  I am now behind on a writing project that I should have finished and sent to beta yesterday. (I haven’t even written the climax yet)

***However***

My Fire in the Woods manuscript now has a KICK BUTT beginning that I believe fixes everything that was wrong with my first draft, and I also have a pitch that I know needs some tweaking, because there were 400 out there that were better than mine.

So, yes, I am behind on my current Work in Progress, but my “Big Tamale” Fire in the Woods is now quite a bit closer to being ready for query land.

So, am I mad I didn’t make the first cut?  Nope, not at all.  It was no reflection on my novel.  They didn’t even look at it.  My pitch didn’t grab them.  No harm, no foul.

Thanks, Amazon, for giving me that extra pressure to fix the overall problems.

What about you guys?  Did anyone make the first cut? Are you in the same boat as me? What do you think about all this?

JenniFer_EatonF

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The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest. Did you enter?

Posted on February 9, 2013 | 34 comments

The window for submitting to the Amazon Breakthrough novel contest has closed.  Did you enter?  Did you even know about it?

With a $50,000 first prize, it does cause quite a stir.

When I first found out about it months ago, I brushed it off because my current WIP, Fire in the Woods was complete, but hovering at a pitiful 42,000 words and didn’t make the minimum word count.  Then a few weeks ago people started talking about it again as the submission window opened, and guess what?  I was now ABOVE THE REQUIRED WORD COUNT.

So, did I enter?  You bet your left butt cheek I did!

Do I have high hopes?  Well, 1 in 10,000 is really not all that bad in odds, if you consider that 50% of the entries will probably be junk.  I’m a realist though…

Round one is based on your pitch.  Pitching is not my strong point.  I like my pitch, but I have no idea if it is good enough to be selected as a top choice.  When I looked at the pitches of past winners, I had to scratch my head.  If I saw some of those, I would have passed them over… so who knows what they are REALLY looking for (or were all the others really that bad?) Ha!

So, I have no idea how I will do… but what this did force me to do is speed up my editing process, and completely re-write my beginning.  My manuscript is a lot sharper now than it was a few weeks ago, so if anything, that’s a plus for me.

Do I have a chance of winning?  Well, I kind of look at it like this… I looked at past winners, and I felt the same way as I do about the Oscars.  Movies that win an Oscar are the ones that I would rather get a root canal than have to sit through.  To me, Oscar=boring.  That’s the way I feel about a lot of the past Breakthrough Novel winners as well.  I am sure they were well written, but not “my cup of tea”.

So, no…. Fire in the Woods is not the “Artsy” type that usually wins this type of thing.  But I entered.  At least I tried — and I did a lot of polishing to get it there.

Who knows?  This year might be the year of the manic chase/explosion novel!

Good luck to everyone who entered!

_JenniFer____EatoN

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