amazonThe Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest (ABNA 2014) is coming up. The company will start accepting entries next month.

So, how many of you are entering?

The ABNA contest is its seventh year. The grand prize winner will receive a publishing contract with a $50,000 advance. Four first prize winners will get a publishing contract with a $15,000 advance.

The contest isn’t as simple as submitting your manuscript and crossing your fingers. Entrants go through several rounds starting with a pitch, then an excerpt and then the manuscript.

This contest has caused a lot of burgeoning authors to yank their hair out as they word the pitch perfectly and hope their first 5,000 words hit the right tone with the judges.

Winning this is a great opportunity for self-published authors and will allow them to get promoted through Amazon’s channels. Its 2013 grand prize winner [easyazon-link asin=”B00CQC9O16″ locale=”us”]Timebound[/easyazon-link] by Rysa Walker was promoted through Amazon’s early reading program.

The book – while relatively popular before its latest incarnation – has more than 1,200 reviews on Amazon and 2,644 ratings on Amazon. I hadn’t heard of Timebound before Amazon began its promotion of its winner – but I wound up buying it and mostly enjoying Timebound.

This is the kind of break that many authors seek because one book that does well helps get the author’s name recognized, which would lead to other sales of books that the author is trying to promote.

Amazon will begin taking entries on Feb. 16.

What have you been doing to prepare for the contest?

Read more about the contest here.

1 COMMENT

  1. I started reading the discussion threads in the Amazon ABNA community and really learned a lot about crafting a pitch. It seemed to help since I made it past the “pitch stage” . I’m now in the quarter finals with my entry, “Donuts and Doorknobs”. I must admit the vine reviewer in the second stage of judging said s/he thought my pitch was hokey (even though she liked the excerpt she read and passed me on to the next stage). So I don’t know how effective my pitch actually was.

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