Heather Brewer, from right here in St. Louis, who I mentioned in a previous blog of mine, has a new book out in April. It’s part two of her Chronicles of Vladimir Tod series. Check it out!
Yeah, so Amazon.com narrowed down their ABNA semi-finalists to the top 100 this week. Woo……hoo! I’m overcome with excitement….Bueller….Bueller….Bueller…
If you haven’t heard, back in October Amazon.com teamed up with Penguin Publishing and HP for this cool contest where authors could sign up and upload the first 5,000 words of their manuscript. To sign up and reserve your spot, you had to create a CreateSpace account, which is basically a POD service like Lulu but owned by Amazon. PODdy Mouth posted a great blog about the contest here.
The winner (who gets announced in April) gets a nice HP computer and entertainment package and a $25,000 advance and writing contract through Penguin. Sign me up!
So yeah, I fell for it. I had a completed manuscript and when I saw the Gold Seal ad on Amazon’s home page back on October 1st, I quickly did another edit, signed up, uploaded my goods, and waited. A month later I got my blanket email that I was in! Whoopee! What’s next? Well, me and the other 4,999 entrants had to sit and wait to be narrowed down to 1,000 back in the middle of January. And so, I spent 2 and 1/2 months surfing the message boards, reading the bitch fests, and participating in a few cat fights.
Oh but wait…in December, around 150 of the entrants leaked out on Amazon and you were able to go ahead and download and review them. Ooopsee! Apparently, Amazon was trying to go ahead and get the pages set up for the top 1,000 but didn’t mean for them to go live. I’m sure someone lost their job over that one. The entries were quickly taken down, but when the top 1,000 were finally posted in mid-January, those that had leaked out were indeed there and the reviews they were already given counted.
Happy to say, I didn’t make the 1,000 cut. Yes, you read it right. I was happy. Not sad. For one, I’d already spent almost 3 months obsessing over the damn contest. I was tired of waiting and just glad that I could now exhale and move on, which is exactly what I did. I sat on the manuscript for a few weeks, then polished it, changed the title, and started querying. Meanwhile, those 1,000 entrants who did make it had to wait another month and beg aunts and uncles to log onto Amazon and vote for them.
However, it’s blatantly obvious that some of those who had top votes didn’t make the cut. Some of the top 100 have under 10 reviews! So I have no idea what Amazon and Penguin is judging this all on. I’m also highly disappointed in how little Amazon is advertising all of this. Check out the tiny link on the left side of their home page under Check This Out.
The handful that I stuck around and read didn’t make it to the top 100. Oh well…I wonder how many people have already taken advantage of getting their book published for free through CreateSpace? I gave it some serious thought, but decided against it. I’ve been down that road once before.
Good luck to the top 100 though, and to those who were also rejected already….wherever you are!
Check out Earthly Charms to design and order your own ink pens, magnets, post-its, and book markers. Lots of great stuff to help market yourself and your book, and very affordable. From my own experience of working in bookstores, people love free book markers and most stores are more than happy to have you leave some on the counter if you just ask. And who doesn’t love free stuff?
