Push comes to shove: seven days of labor

Amazon is holding a contest to find the next breakthrough novel (to promote their publishing site, CreateSpace), in partnership with Penguin. They’re accepting the first 5000 registrations, and around 1000 will become ‘semi-finalists’ to have excerpts presented to the Amazon audience for review. Based partially on audience feedback, another 100 will be selected, and then 10, and then 1.

Once you register, you have 7 days to upload the novel.

5000 registrations. They say they’ll close registrations on November 2, or when they reach 5000 registrations. I wonder just how fast they’ll fill up.

I happen to have an unpublished, completed manuscript. And now I have 7 days to give it a final revision. And convince myself it’s worth submitting, even though it’s book 1 of a trilogy.

The cold logical part of me thinks it’s worth doing even though nobody wants book 1 of a trilogy because it will help me get my ass in gear, because I come alive under pressure and deadlines, and because earning any kind of an interested audience of strangers will help keep that pressure up when the contest is long gone.

The cold logical part of me admits that I have a seven week old baby, and that if I don’t make it past the ‘Qualification period’ of ‘up to a thousand’ submissions, I’m going to be pretty depressed. But I don’t think I can let that fear hold me back.

The irrational, frightened side of me says tired and familiar things.

It’d be cool to finish the draft of the second book by the time the Qualification period is done, on January 15th. But I have a manuscript to reread.

Hey, if you’ve read any of the original draft of Citadel of the Sky, I’d love some simple suggestions for a cover image. That’s one of the bits I can upload, and I have a little suspicion that excerpts accompanied by elegant imagery are going to get consistently higher reviews than the other sorts.