Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

i-digress

If you're entering do you use American or British spelling?

pickarooney

For your book or the pitch? I can't imagine it would make a difference either way.

EileenG

It's an international competition, so I think you could use either.

i-digress

pickarooney wrote: »

For your book or the pitch? I can't imagine it would make a difference either way.

Both I suppose. I haven't a hope, but I'd like to get through the first round. Get some form of validation, your own writing is so difficult to judge.

pickarooney

i-digress wrote: »

Both I suppose. I haven't a hope, but I'd like to get through the first round. Get some form of validation, your own writing is so difficult to judge.

Do we not validate you enough?

i-digress

pickarooney wrote: »

Do we not validate you enough?

A woman can never have to much validation

I'm undecided which chapters to put as my extract. The second half of my book is more exciting, but if I use that as an extract will the fact it's out of context hurt me? I dunno.

And writing the pitch is harder than writing the entire novel.

EileenG

For some reason, I have the impression that you are supposed to post up the first 3000-5000 words. In any case, I think you should post those, simply because it's going to be harder for a judge to gauge your story if you take chapters from the middle. And middle chapters do tend to say "These are the best I could find, everything else is worse".

Maybe work on your first chapters? I've found that most first chapters can be cut with very little damage to the novel. It's amazing how often you can replace an entire first chapter with about three extra paragraphs in in the second one.

i-digress

EileenG wrote: »

And middle chapters do tend to say "These are the best I could find, everything else is worse". .

Very true. I like my first chapters, they're just not as exciting as the climactic scenes...but I think you're right about it looking like I'm not happy with my first few chapters if I don't post them.

pickarooney

• Up to the first 5,000 words, but no less than 3,000 words, of your Manuscript, excluding any table of contents, foreword, and acknowledgments (the "Excerpt");

For me that clearly states it must be the first chapters of the book. I had a similar feeling to you about my first chapters and, to be honest, chapters 1,2,3 and 4 needed to be dumped!

EileenG

i-digress wrote: »

And writing the pitch is harder than writing the entire novel.

Post your pitch here, and we'll help you tweak it.

EileenG

I put my entry in this morning. For some reason, the 5000 word excerpt (it does have to be the first chapters) went nuts and words ran into each other on every line. I wasn't getting red underlines for misspellings, so it might have been just how it appeared on the screen, but I spent ages separating them out anyway.

The good news is that you can edit your entry even after it's in.

pickarooney

I think I'll give it a miss. Current book is a write off and it'll be at least a year before the next one is ready.

EileenG

Do the pitch anyway. Even if you know the novel won't go far, it's worth seeing if you can write an effective pitch. And you do have time to polish the first couple of chapters.

pickarooney

EileenG wrote: »

Do the pitch anyway. Even if you know the novel won't go far, it's worth seeing if you can write an effective pitch. And you do have time to polish the first couple of chapters.

I wrote a pitch, but it doesn't bear any real relation to what the book I'm going to completely rewrite is about :P

i-digress

Views on titles? 'Ravensborough', 'Darkfield','Conflicted',.

Opinions anyone? I'm useless at titles.:rolleyes:

EileenG

I wouldn't worry too much about the title. It's the pitch which is important in the first round of the ABNA, and if you sell to a publisher, they are likely to change the title anyway.

pickarooney

Ah well, I put it in anyway just as a form of closure. I had the same problem with the pitch being all misformatted with spaces removed. They should really do something about that.

I have this whole new idea all itching to get written now. I just need to close a couple of plot holes.

i-digress, post up your pitch and I'll see if a title jumps out at me.

pickarooney

It looks like they have their quote of 5000 general fiction entries but are still taking submissions for the YA section.

Did you get yours in, i-digress?

I'm glad I put mine in now; it's given me the kick I needed to completely redo the thing and I've got three new chapters done since.

i-digress

pickarooney wrote: »

It looks like they have their quote of 5000 general fiction entries but are still taking submissions for the YA section.

Did you get yours in, i-digress?

I'm glad I put mine in now; it's given me the kick I needed to completely redo the thing and I've got three new chapters done since.

I got mine in, but am having second thoughts now...I don't think my book is suited for an American market. I know it's an international competition, but the competition is with Penguin USA. My book is ready, so I'm thinking of just starting to send it out through the usual channels? Maybe ABNA is just a waste of time?

I don't know. I have one book out already in a competition, and am starting my third and fourth books now. When you start writing, finishing the thing seems so far away. But the hard bit really starts when you finish it.

EileenG

They say International, so they can't use an all-American slant.

I reckon it's worth doing, if only so you can tell potential agents or publisher that it got so far in the ABNA. That alone means that it is worth sending to the top of the slush pile.

Reading over the discussion groups on Amazon, it looks like the top 100 or so of last year's entries all got published, not just the winner.

pickarooney

Was the feedback you got last year any use, Eileen or was it just something vague or what you already knew?

EileenG

It was very useful. One judge made a comment about "the tiresome moralising in the muddled fluff in the middle". Okay, I hated hearing that, but it did make me go though the whole book, pulling it apart to make sure I got rid of moralising and fluff.

There were lots of nice comments too, from judges and reviews who didn't know me, so it encouraged me to keep going, but showed where I needed to put in the work.

pickarooney

It would be nice to get something kindly mean like that. I keep going round in circles trying to get rid of a plot thread and then thinking I need to keep bits... a straightforward "this bit sucks" or "kill this guy, keep the girl" would be great.

EileenG

Not really that sort of review (I could probably do that, I'm good at finding bits of other people's work to cut) more about a stranger coming to it cold reacts to it, what aspects worked and which didn't.

pickarooney

It's very hard to get someone to read a whole book though, especially if when they're finish you announced that you've completely rewritten it and their feedback is useless

EileenG

At least by the time they get to the full novel, there's been a lot of weeding done. I feel very sorry for whoever has to wade though 10,000 pitches. That's got be a mind-numbing job.

pickarooney

I honestly don't know how you could keep track of what you'd read when doing the pitches. I can barely keep track of what my own one is about.

EileenG

I reckon it will amount to which pitches the reader can read through to the end. Some of the ones I've seen on discussion groups were too boring to read 300 words of.

i-digress

Yay! I'm through to the second round, and so is EileenG!

Didn't know anybody else's real names, so I couldn't check.

EileenG

Congrats!

It really does seem to be very random. A friend of mine wrote a pitch for herself and another man. He got through on the pitch she wrote, and she didn't get through on her own pitch. Both pitches were good, so it looks like the standard this year is high.