Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest

The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest is a literary contest that began in October 2007 and is set to end when the winner is announced on April 7, 2008. The contest is based on the unpublished submissions of 5000 authors from more than 20 different nations.

The Contest Begins

On October 1st, 2007, various literary websites and news agencies reported that Amazon.com was holding a contest for unpublished writers. [http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2007-10-01-online-literary-contests_N.htm, USA Today Article reporting the contest, ] Very quickly, word spread throughout the internet and the contest was underway. [ [http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2007/10/01/amazon-novel.html] Literary website reporting the beginning of the contest, 10-01-2007] The conditions of joining (that the manuscript be unpublished, register with Createspace) caused some annoyance early on as many of the early entrants found the description of the contest terms and rules ambiguous and/or confusing. On the forums that had been set up on the site, possible entrants quickly set up a small internet community based on answering each other's concerns and helping others to figure out what the correct formatting was to be for entries.

Some people on these message boards expressed annoyance at having to sign up for Amazon.com's proprietary self-publishing and distributing services, Booksurge and Createspace. But this annoyance was overshadowed by the enthusiasm of many entrants who saw this as their chance to get exposure for their manuscript. Some entrants were completely new to the world of publishing, while others had tried to have several books published, to varying degrees of success.

The contest was to have up to 5,000 entrants, and entries had to be formatted in Microsoft Word, a point of contention for many on the early forums. Soon, however, more people began to get involved and there was much speculation as to when the 5,000-entry limit would be reached, and what the result would be on those who had misformatted their entries.

For the rest of October and the first few days of November, speculation ran high as to how many people were participating, until Amazon announced that the total submissions goal had been reached and that all further submissions would be placed on a standby list. All that was left for those that had submitted their entry was to wait.

First Cut

November 5th, 2007 brought the first part of the contest, the registration, to a close. The message boards filled with several threads about those who had or had not made the cut and what the next stage of the contest would look like. For a time, the activity on the forums began to dwindle, and while there was steady activity, things did not begin to pick up again until the new year, when more and more of the 5,000 still-eligible participants began to check in on the Amazon website to see what the status of the contest was.

econd Cut

On January 15th, 2008 acceptance and rejection emails were sent to the 5,000 participants cutting the semi-finalists to 856, despite Amazon.com previously stating there would be 1,000 semi-finalists. Excerpts of the 856 entries were made immediately available for customers to download and review. Much controversy has continued to circle on the ABNA message boards concerning Publisher Weekly Reviews and Top Amazon Reviews of the excerpts that appear on each one as a product description. Some of these reviews have been quite negative, raising question as to how the excerpt made the semi-final cut anyway, or the negative comments could possibly be persuading unknown reviewers from taking the time to download and give non-persuaded feedback.

References

External links

* [http://www.amazon.com/b?node=332264011 Amazon's official website for the contest]