I won’t be submitting The Lustre or The Disenchanted Pet to the Amazon Breakthrough Award, because they only accept manuscripts of 50,000 words or more. Neither one has this many, so neither will qualify. Oh well! I guess this is why I self-published! Maybe next year I can finish How to Win Friends and Influence Magicians in time for the contest (and make it longer).
If you were thinking of submitting and your novel is more than 150,000 words, you’re out of luck too. What is this magical number and where did they get it? Why are books that aren’t in that window not even worth their notice? And where is the beef?
Something I am not going to cry about–the prize is a $15,000 advance and by submitting your entry you are agreeing to accept that as your payment. They will negotiate your other payments later and will not promise anything. I wasn’t too in love with that one, not because I hate the idea of $15,000 but that it seems limiting. Call it my indie ‘tude, but should we settle for that much for all the rights to our books? Because that is all they are promising, and if you submit–just submit–you aren’t allowed to benefit from your book in any way until they “release” you by disqualifying you for the next round.
I’m still bummed I can’t enter because I think it is a great opportunity, but on the bright side, I got some great ideas for “pitching” my book! They have a bunch of articles on writing your book pitch and I wrote one for TDP and The Lustre before I found the word count thing.
If any of my bloggers who ARE entering want input on their pitch, feel free to post it in comments or link to your post!
Kate Policani 
Word count is one of the reasons I managed to make my first legitimate try longer. To be honest, I love shorter works, as it suits me — I quickly get to the points I want to make (one of the many reasons). However, I like trying for 80k-90k and a bit beyond as well and have done so for the last few, because it challenges me to push my limits when it comes to writing and that’s always a good thing.
Both of my current works are shorter because the stories didn’t hold any more content without getting wordy or dragging. My goal for my next one is to hit that wordcount. I plan for it to be a series, so that should be easier.