I saw my name and the name of my novel and I screamed with happiness."She decided to enter her book again in January 2013. "I remember the night the first-stage ‘winners’ were announced.
I don’t know if that was it, but I didn’t make it past the pitch stage.” She had entered the ABNA contest in 2012 with no success: “I left my name in the header of one of the files. So she took her YA novel and self-published it through her own imprint, Gypsy Moon Books. When she reached out to agents, Walker says, “I didn’t hear back, or heard ‘this isn’t for me.’ ” The book, inspired by her work as a historian and her interest in the equal rights movement, was titled Time’s Twisted Arrow. In between teaching history online for the University of Maryland and shuttling her two kids off to school, she would work from her home office on her story about a time traveling teen named Kate. She had started writing her YA novel in 2004, back when her son was still wearing Elmo slippers. One of this year’s entrants, North Carolina–based Rysa Walker, couldn’t find a literary agent. “It forces the work to stand on its own and speak for itself,” wrote Terry Goodman, senior editor at Amazon Publishing, via email-which makes the ABNA contest perhaps the most democratic way of getting a debut novel published. There is no fee to enter, and submissions are judged without revealing the authors’ names until the semifinal round-a sort of blind taste test. Publishers Weekly critics and Amazon editors curate the first rounds of submissions, but the final round enlists Amazon customers to vote for their favorite novel out of five finalists, which wins the Grand Prize-a publishing contract with a $50,000 advance. Think of it as American Idol for new authors: the experts weigh in, and the audience votes.
In this contest, which is capped at 10,000 entries, the book pitch and the manuscript are what matter-not an author’s track record or book industry connections. Since 2008, the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award has discovered and published authors, many of whom have never been published before.
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