A friend asked about the 2013 ABNA process of selection and moving up. I summed up the process and thought it would be interesting to anyone else who doesn’t want to crawl through all the rules and date pages from Amazon to figure it out. Enjoy:
February 13, First Round’s 10,000 Entrants were cut to 2,000 Second Round Selections (max 400 per 5 genre categories) chosen by editorial review and scoring of the book “pitch” (aka a 300 word or less description of the book.) If you look at the YouTube trailer description for Thread Slivers you’ll see the pitch I used minus one key spoiler paragraph. The major difference between a pitch and a blurb is a pitch has to encapsulate the entire story revealing why it is unique, while a blurb is an intriguing teaser that explains enough of the plot to encourage further reading. Based on my pitch Thread Slivers is in the top 20% of entrants’ ideas for a book.
March 12, the 2000 Round 2 entries will be cut down to 500 Quarter-finalists, independent of genre, based on Amazon’s professional publishers’ and editors’ review of the first 5000 words of each entry (aka the first 15-20 pages of the book).
April 16, the 500 Quarter-finalists will be cut down to 25 Semifinalists by Publishers Weekly reviewing each Quarter-Finalists’ full manuscript.
May 21, the 25 Semifinalists will be cut down to 5 finalists by Amazon Publishing Editors reading Semi-Finalists’ manuscripts picking the 5 Finalists.
May 21-29, Amazon customers vote to pick the Grand Prize Winner from the 5 Finalists.
June 15, The Grand Prize winner will be announced based off of the Amazon customer voting.
