Thursday, December 04, 2008

Dust off that old manuscript

This is kind of interesting--Amazon has announced the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards where you can send in your unpublished novel for consideration:

The Breakthrough Novel Award brings together talented writers, reviewers and publishing experts to find and develop new voices in fiction. If you're an author with an unpublished novel waiting to be discovered, visit CreateSpace to learn more about the next Breakthrough Novel Award and sign up for regular updates on the contest. Open submissions for manuscripts begin in February 2009.


So, if you have a finished novel you wrote 10 years ago up in the attic, dust it off and send it in. You never know--you might just get struck by dumb luck.

8 Comments:

Blogger Slamdunk said...

a good idea--i hope they identify some of the talented yet undiscovered folks out there.

2:13 PM, December 04, 2008  
Blogger smitty1e said...

Kinda disappointed by the post title.
I figured man-u-script was some sort of programming tool for mantyhose wearers. ;)

2:27 PM, December 04, 2008  
Blogger Jennifer Stites said...

Oh Smitty,
You must have been thinking of the famous man-u-strip program.

2:41 PM, December 04, 2008  
Blogger Danny said...

Does one have a better chance of winning this contest, if they also include a picture of oneself wearing a pair of mantyhose? :)

3:55 PM, December 04, 2008  
Blogger Jennifer Stites said...

Danny,
From what I've heard about slush piles in publishing, anything is worth a try.

5:30 PM, December 04, 2008  
Blogger . said...

I wouldn't bother with these kinds of punks - not even for the price of a stamp.

Publishers are notoriously worse than TV for their PC stance and many an author has bit the dust merely on the premise that the (mostly) female reviewers (did I mention most reviewers are psycho fembots with a wishy washy degree in something useless?) simply felt that the novel did not glorify women appropriately.

The cold hard facts are that even if you do get published, somehow, somewhere, you would be lucky to break $5k on your novel. Heck, I personally know a woman who won the Governor General's Award for Literature (one of the highest literary awards in Canada), and she said the $10,000 prize for the award FAR exceeded the royalties from the novel.

If you write for the burning desire to write, as some of us mooks do, publish it on the internet and tell the publishers to go to hell. Books are dying fast and hopefully jack off pc publishers will die with them. But, seriously now, who is writing good fiction for the internet?

Mark Twain would never have been published today for his use of the word "nigger" in his novels. Note, I am only quoting a word in a novel, and yet, some pc morons must have gotten their dander up, I'm sure. Read on with Twain and how he examined that Jews were wrong for blaming Christians for anti-semitism and, well, his case defending Christianity is pretty compelling. However, it certainly wouldn't fly today.

In todays climate, Mark Twain would be tending your garden... if he could make it to work, what with insane rent, food and gas prices.

Then again, Einstein would also be sweeping your University floors with his paltry credentials.

Ayn Rand's "Fountainhead" was pretty much tossed on the cutting room floor even after she had published "We the Living." If not for her agent going to the mat for her and nearly threatening to resign should the book not get published, none would have read her later work, "Atlas Shrugged."

None of these authors would get published today.

Why, 50 or 100 years ago, one might have viewed these things an opportunity, given such a massive suppression of real talent in the world for PC purposes. There is certainly a dearth of quality literature today, and I doubt it is because all 6.7 Billion of us are illiterate.

Do it yourself and circumvent the system. You'll be doing yourself and humanity a favour by telling the "mighty" to go to hell.

Unless, of course, you are only in it for the money, in which case it would be YOU that is the idiot, lol!

2:55 AM, December 05, 2008  
Blogger Jennifer Stites said...

Rob,
I have run into this PC garbage in trying to do children's illustration. There are some conservative and Christian publishers that I have yet to approach. But my first comments from children's publishing forums were that I didn't have enough different ethnic children in my portfolio and that I needed to lose a drawing that had a nascar type theme. I could get no comments on the quality of the work. Which might explain the level of illustration I'm seeing now in what I call the Tree Hugging series.

6:03 AM, December 05, 2008  
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