ABNA again
I don’t know whether I mentioned it, but I put the great work in for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, as I did with last year’s effort. This year I was better prepared, so I had a revised and expanded version (76,000 words) ready to go. I decided to change the title as well and call it ‘The Dictator’s Daughter’ which sounds a bit more commercial to me.
Anyway, I’ve heard that it got through the first round. Last year’s effort also got that far; I think the first round, which is based entirely on a ‘pitch’ you provide for the novel, merely filters out the entries which don’t meet the competition requirements, those which are palpably incoherent or mad, the obvious rewrites of current popular films, egregious porn, and long sword-and-sorcery epics (which appear to account for about half of all entries.
What it does mean is that in about a month I should get a couple of critiques from people who have actually read the excerpt (the first ten thousand words). Only if the entry passes that second stage (which last year’s didn’t) will we get to the point where someone actually reads the manuscript in its entirety.
