They posted the results of the pitch round for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest today. I did not make it. This is the first time of the five times I've entered that I've not made this first round. Am I shocked? I have to admit, a little. I've used pretty much the same pitch the last four times. It was bound to eventually fail me.Maybe I was a bit over confident.
This round of course tells nothing of what kind of writer I am. It only tells that my pitch was worse than 400 other YA entrants. Oh well. Moving forward. Here are my plans:
- Wait for editor to finish reading An Unbalanced Line. If she rejects, that is the novel I'm planning to self pub. If she wants it, revise Lockdown and self pub.
- Revise Dissection and send back to agent that wants to read it. If she doesn't want it, self pub.
- Continue working on other books, Rumpelstiltskin retelling, post apocalyptic YA and other things I've started. I need to buckle down and get some of these written.
- Continue with side projects.
I congratulate and wish all the contestants still in ABNA the best of luck.
Same here. I did not make it.
ReplyDeleteThis was my first time though. I am self-publishing and I will try other ways too. I just think that there is no harm to self-publish and if there is more to come...I will welcome them. :)
Good luck for the second phase to all the entries that passed.
Just jumping in to say that I don't think having your pitch cut tells you that it was worse than 400 other ones. All if tells you is that some group of people you don't know anything about preferred them for reasons you'll never know. They could have been looking for something else. Your aesthetics didn't match. Whatever.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's cold comfort but I honestly don't think it tells you much of anything at all.
Athina, I agree with the whole self pubbing thing. I think the stigma with it has changed and it's changing the entire publishing industry. Good luck to you.
ReplyDeleteAnd Jeff, maybe you're right. My content was a little dark, maybe they were turned off by a book about a cutter. Who knows? I'll never find out. Meh. lol.
I don't know that it's universally true, as there were surely several reviewers, but the pitches for YA that I saw that went through DID pass the 'protectionist censor' in my opinion. Mine, like yours, was on the dark side, and I haven't had ANYBODY read the pitch who hasn't said 'I want to read that', so I don't think my pitch was my problem. I think they were looking for a certain flavor that is maybe school library friendly. MIGHT be a faulty conclusion based on anecdotal information, but at this point, that is what it looks like to me. I wish you a TON of luck with self pubbing. I think you and I offer similar flavors, so I will be watching closely.
ReplyDeleteThanks Hart. I know you're looking to traditionally publish your YA and I wish you luck with that.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Amazon gave the pitch reviewers some parameters to go by. That would be interesting to know.