I discovered an exciting contest from Amazon yesterday here: https://www.createspace.com/abna Amazon is going to review book pitches and choose six to be published by Penguin! This is wonderful and I immediately read up on it linked everything, and put some important excerpts into a OneNote notebook. I set up an Astrid task reminder to alert me when to submit because submission opens toward the end of this month.
When all that was done and I had time to mull it over, the doubts set in. Maybe I should wait until next year because…I may not be ready for the work of traditional publishing. I may not want to be published traditionally yet anyway because I love the autonomy of being Indie. My writing may benefit more from a year of waiting. It looks like a lot of work and do I have the time to make it work? Do I want the work that comes from success?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m still going to submit something. But it wasn’t a snap decision, partly because I had time to think about it.
What do you think about this contest, and would you enter? Explain. (This will be graded on a curve and late papers will be docked a grade percentage for each late day. :P)
Kate Policani 
Really interesting. Thank you for writing a post about it for I had no idea this existed. Will I give it a chance? Why not. It’s woth a try, I’ve got nothing to lose. The worse that can happen is that I do not get selected, and if so, then I’m back to where I am now, which is fine.
I did submit something somewhere else, and I didn’t get selected, and the most important thing for me, was that I TRIED, instead of being chicken. So go for it, you’ve got nothing to lose 🙂
Good point! It’s always a good motivator for me to prove my valor.
Kate, yes, you’re brave! Go at your own prayerful pace. Respect your sense of what is right for you to be doing right now. If you decide to do this, remember what Alannah said. It’s a contest with nothing to lose.
Thanks so much for this post!
I would enter this in a heartbeat. I grew up on Penguin published books (who didn’t) and as such value their position as a traditional publisher; including their subsidiaries. This looks to be an amazing opportunity and even if an individual is like you — loves self-publishing, there’s nothing to stop you from continuing to do so with other works, even if the one you submit to the contest is chosen to be published traditionally. As Alannah said, you quite literally have nothing to lose here.
I got a little adrenaline rush when I first saw it. I guess it isn’t so heavily advertised because they don’t have to.