Penguin Group (USA) and Amazon.com today announced the second annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Competition, the international contest seeking the next popular novel, which will launch on February 2nd 2009.

During the tremendously successful inaugural competition, Bill Loehfelm emerged as the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Grand Prize Winner from a pool of 5,000 entrants. G. P. Putnam's Sons published his novel, Fresh Kills, in August 2008 to critical acclaim. The Associated Press hailed the novel as "the finest crime fiction debut since Dennis Lehane burst on the scene...not just a crime novel but a psychological novel of impressive subtlety and complexity." Mr. Loehfelm said, "The opportunity to enter this contest and share my manuscript with two publishing industry innovators like Penguin Group and Amazon was thrilling enough-but to go from longtime struggling writer to nationally published author in nine months is an aspiring writer's dream."

Here is how the contest will work: between February 2nd and February 8th, 2009, writers with an unpublished English-language novel manuscript can submit their work at www.amazon.com/abna. Up to 10,000 initial entries will be accepted, from which Amazon editors will select 2,000 to advance to the next round. Expert reviewers from Amazon will then review excerpts of these 2,000 entries and narrow the pool to 500 quarter-finalists. Reviewers from Publishers Weekly will then read, rate and review the full manuscripts, and 100 semi-finalists will be selected. At that point, a group of your editorial colleagues will personally read these top 100 submissions, and ultimately choose three finalists.

A panel of esteemed publishing professionals-including mega-bestselling Penguin Group (USA) authors Sue Grafton and Sue Monk Kidd, literary agent Barney Karpfinger and Penguin Press Editor-in-Chief Eamon Dolan-will read and post their critiques of the top three manuscripts on www.amazon.com. Amazon customers will then have seven days to vote for the Grand Prize Winner. The winner will be announced on May 22, 2009, and will receive a publishing contract with Penguin Group (USA), which includes a $25,000 advance.

More than 5,000 registrations were received for the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, representing approximately 2,000 cities around the world and every state in the United States. Due to the tremendous response last year, up to 10,000 entries will be accepted for the 2009 contest. The contest will also take place over a shorter period of three and a half months, as opposed to six months last year.

The high caliber of the 2008 contest submissions resulted in the discovery of fresh new voices from among the Top 10 Finalists. Penguin Group (USA) acquired four more Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contestants' novels: Bad Things Happen by Harry Dolan (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, July 2009); The Wet Nurse's Tale by Erica Eisdorfer (G.P. Putnam's Sons, August 2009); The Butterflies of Grand Canyon by Margaret Erhard (Plume, January 2010); and Casting Off by Nicole Dickson (NAL, August 2009).

We're confident that the 2009 competition will be even more successful than the last one, and though Penguin Group (USA) employees are again ineligible to enter, we hope all of you will enjoy observing the process as it rolls out over the next few months. For more information and details about the competition, please click on the following link: http://us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/features/amazonbreakthrough/index.html

Read more about Fresh Kills by Bill Loehfelm

Fresh Kills, Amazon Breakthrough Competition, fiction,books, Penguin Books novel