Amazon And Penguin Launch Writing Contest

Amazon has teamed up with Penguin Group for the fourth annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, an international writing competition. The competition calls both fiction and young adult writers to submit their English-language works for the chance to be published by Penguin in 2011. The contest is open to unpublished and self-published works and writers can enter between Jan. 24 and Feb. 6, 2011.

The contest will accept up to 5,000 works in each of the two categories. Amazon will do the first round of judging and will choose 1,000 entries from fiction and 1,000 entries from young adult. In the second judging round, Amazon.com editors and reviewers will read excerpts of the 2,000 entries and narrow it down to 250 quarter-finalists in each category. Fifty finalists in each category will then be chosen by reads from Publishers Weekly reviewers. Penguin editors will then judge these works and choose three finalists for each award.

Panels of publishing professionals will judge the top three manuscripts. Panelists for the general fiction category include author Lev Grossman, literary agent Jennifer Joel of ICM and Marysue Rucci, Vice President, Editorial Director with G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The panelists for the young adult fiction contest include: author/journalist Gayle Forman, literary agent Julie Just of Janklow & Nesbit and Jennifer Besser, Vice President and Publisher, G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers.

Amazon customers will also be given the chance to vote on these finalists and the winner will be announced in New York on June 13, 2011. Each winner will receive a publishing contract with Penguin with a $15,000 advance.

For more information, follow this link.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.