I should have mentioned this earlier on in the week, but I fail. Just a lil bit. Sorry! Anyway, for those of you who don’t know, Amazon runs an annual competition; the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. This year they catagories have been expanded to include the likes of horror/fantasy/sci fi (woohoo!) so I thought I’d enter. Thank you so much Erin for posting about this and several other opportunities. I pinged it straight to my Twitter and Facebook, so I hope those of you who caught sight of it and have a novel ready to go have been able to do something about it.

Anyway on hearing about the opportunity with Amazon I picked up SORB and sent it straight out. There was absolutely no reason not to since the competition was open to my genre (yey!). I’ve received my acknowledgement and now just need to sit back and wait until February to see if I’ve made it to the next round or not.

Now, I named this post ‘Next’ because I’m trying to get into the habit of sending out my work. I’ve already talked about the Phoenix Subs Club and my entry into Flash500 and I thought, since it’s getting close to the point that HarperVoyager would advise whether or not they wished to pursue SORB, it is well passed time to see where else it can go. No sooner had I made that decision than I received an email from HarperVoyager advising that they regretfully would not be pursuing my novel. Perfect, right? Obviously it’s a shame that they chose not to take it up, but that freed me to enter Amazon’s competition with no worries, since both insist on exclusivity.

Normally I’d be querying the novel again, since my real aim is to get an agent, but while these competitions keep popping up, there is no harm in sending them there first. ‘Cutting out the middle man’ by potentially winning one of these things is a really attractive idea to me. And it may even help in the search for an agent, if I can say such and such a publisher is interested in my work and has offered a contract.

So I have another entry to add to my submissions spreadsheet. That’s already double what I was hoping to be able to do this month and I have another short story almost ready for this competition. I think I’m doing an okay job of building up the habit. 🙂

What about you guys? Have you entered competitions or made any queries lately?