Amazon will open soon for entries for the 2012 Breakthrough Novel Award--are you ready? Here are the quick details from their website:
"The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award brings together talented writers, reviewers, and publishing experts to find and develop new voices in fiction. The 2012 international contest will award two grand prizes: one for General Fiction and one for Young Adult Fiction. Each winner will receive a publishing contract with Penguin, which includes a $15,000 advance.
Open submissions for manuscripts will begin on January 23, 2012 and run through February 5, 2012."
One of the most important components of your entry is the pitch, and I thought I'd round up some web pages with useful advice on pitches, and the related query summary:
Have to start out with Pitch University; so much good stuff squirreled away in the articles and case studies!
Nathan Bransford has many concise, helpful blog posts on crafting a pitch, but his post on "The One Sentence, One Paragraph, and Two Paragraph Pitch" handily combines his advice in one place.
The Absolute Write Water Cooler forum has a Query Letter Hell section in Show Your Work, and it is a crash course in what works and what doesn't in a query.
And see that blogroll I have in the sidebar? Hit all those blogs and do a search for "queries" and "pitches", and you'll find a gold mine of information from agents, editors, and writers. Even doing a search on Google will yield some worthwhile sources.
Good luck to those who enter--and even if you don't enter, it's a great excuse to polish your pitch!
(clip art source)
3 comments:
I would *love* to be published by Penguin! I'll have to look into that. Thanks!
Jan 23! That's so soon! Thanks for the info.
Hi Eliza--yes, it is soon! But if you have a novel completed, and you've been wondering what to do with it, this is one option to consider.
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