Last month I entered the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) with Hitchhikers. On Thursday they posted the list of those who had made the first cut, from 10,000 entries down to 2,000 (1,000 each in two categories, adult & YA). It took me a while to scroll down to the S’s, where I discovered my novel had made the cut! Check it out for yourself!

The first cut is based solely on the novel’s “pitch” – essentially what you’d send in as a query letter. Now I just have to wait until the end of March, when they’ll announce the novels that will move on to the third round. The next cut will be based on each novel’s excerpt (the first 5,000 words of the novel).  Of course, now that I can’t change anything about it, I realized that there was some kind of error when I pasted in my excerpt which made spaces between some of the words disappear… 😦  I thought I had fixed them all but now I see several errors in the first paragraph alone… hopefully they’ll read beyond the first paragraph and not judge me too harshly!