Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Quarterfinalist!

Since I'm pretty new to this whole blog thing, I'm guessing I should have posted the news here first. Whoops! Every other source of social networking has been updated prior to this but hey, I'm a slow learner.

Anyway! The news came in at about 1:34am EST on St. Patrick's Day. I'm officially in the quarterfinals for Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Contest!

"Hooray!" you say. "Now what the hell does that mean?"

It means I'm one of 500 people vying for a publishing contract from Penguin. It also means that a for-real, legitimate editor/publisher/person-in-the-biz will be reviewing my entire manuscript! That's big news when you're trying to separate yourself from the flock of other people trying to get an agent/publishing contract. Here's the catch:

An excerpt from my story is up at Amazon's page. I NEED people to download it (for free!) read it, hopefully post a short review and score it. Fairly straightforward. Here's the link:

http://tinyurl.com/csdn77

There's a "Download for Free" button to the right of the book information. I assure you this is very important as the judges look at customer reviews as well as the professional reviews. Help a brotha out!

I'll be updating any progress that occurs in the next month or so, as I await the list of semi-finalists released on about April 15th and try not to go insane.

Thank you in advance for all your help!

~VK