About a month ago I got word that my unpublished novel The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon had made the second round of this year’s Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award in the General Fiction category. This was certainly nice, but given how many steps there are in the Amazon contest, I didn’t make too big of a deal out of it at the time. I posted about it on my Twitter and Facebook, but I wanted to see if I got through to the quarterfinals before I made a big deal out of it.
Yeah, uh, guess what? I made the quarterfinals.
There are still a couple of more rounds to go before the finals, but I’ve already made the top 100 out of approximately 5,000 entrants, so that’s something at least. Even if I don’t win the big prize, just getting to the finals will get me a guaranteed publishing contract with a $15,000 advance, so I’m hoping for the best here, while still preparing to work with agents and publishers to get the book published traditionally in the event that I don’t win.
As part of the contest, you were able to download the first two chapters of The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon as a free Kindle file off of Amazon, but Amazon deleted it sometime after I posted this blog. (I’ll have to stop entering the novel into competitions after this one simply because I can’t afford to give much more of the book away for free.) For some reason all the reader comments that were on the excerpt’s Amazon page earlier in the day — some of it so glowing that “effusive” doesn’t even begin to describe it — disappeared, but if you’d download the excerpt and give it your honest feedback, I would be most appreciative.
As always, following The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon on Facebook and Google+ also helps me sell the novel, in addition to keeping you updated on smaller news surrounding the novel. More than ever, though, anything you can do spread news of my book within your own circles would be deeply appreciated. As long as I’m in the Amazon contest I’m going to have a spotlight, however dim, on me, and this may be the best opportunity I will have for a long time to build a fanbase for the book. In the event that I’m back to looking for agents and/or publishers next month, the more people I have clamoring for the book, the more likely I’ll be to convince agents and publishers to take a chance on me.
As always, thank you to everyone for your support over the years. Today was another important milestone, but there are still many more steps to go in this journey.