Attract Mode

ABNA madness

January 9th, 2008

The moderated forums for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award have descended into madness.

Over the course of a week, the threadcount shot from around 850 to over 1000. Why? Because 1000 was a nice round number. Seriously. People were posting single post-topics consisting of rhetorical questions, goofy observations, conversations with themselves (one statement per topic), single statements spread out across many topic titles and even, in a few cases, the estimated number of the topic.

I think currently there’s a race on to see who can bring one of several topics to 1000 replies first.

5 days or so until voting begins on the semifinalists. Then we’ll know for sure who’s in and who’s out. Amazon has posted some teasing back-end manipulations available to the obsessive searcher. Back near Christmas, a list of 100 or so entries showed up, flagged as ABNA Official Entrant (along with 4 public domain classics). The unfamiliar ones were confirmed as real entries by some of the entrants and they were downloadable and reviewable for a couple of days. The novel about Guatemala and the Air Traffic Controller’s novel both racked up a handful of five star reviews before the entries and their reviews all vanished.

A week or so after that, searching on ABNA Official Entrant brought up a list, with category tags alongside (just as before) but instead of a title it said ‘title not available’. There were a hundred and fifty or so of these– and, most mysterious, you could search on ABNA Official Entrant and some other search term, and a category might or might not come up. Like… your name, or a word in your title. Some people reported a matching category. Some did not. I tested this for myself– nothing related to me came up but I saw it happen with words like ‘murder’ (2 hits) and a few other titles. Apparently the number of total entries along with what words got hits varied over the few days THAT list was up.

Now, the only thing that comes up when one searches are books tagged by enterprising contest members as ‘abna 5000′– books and other media previously produced by entrants in the contest, or writers who have mentioned it in their Amazon blogs (I think). Interesting insight into how the tagging system works with the search engine, there…

I’m definitely checking my email and junk mail regularly. My fingers are crossed. I’m trying to get some work done, too. Although I’m disappointed in the descent of the ABNA forum, it’s a blessing in disguise, since I didn’t really need to be wasting my time on interesting discussions about writing, anyhow.

Categories: Updates From the Void | Tags: amazon breakthrough novel contest