Barb and the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest
Beginning October 1, 2007 at 6:00 a.m. (U.S. Eastern Daylight Savings Time) Amazon solicited unpublished manuscripts looking for "next great novel." Entries were limited to 5,000, and would go through several rounds of judging. In the first round, exerpts consisting of the first 5,000 words of the novel were judged by a panel of judges, including Amazon editors and at least one Amazon Top Reviewer. Under 900 entries made it through this round, and Barb's new novel, LIBERTY'S JUSTICE, was one of them.
Now the second round of judging bgegins, and here's where you can help Barb. From now until March 2, Amazon.com customers are invited to download, read, and review the excerpt and help decide who will make it to the Top Ten. Penguin will select manuscripts to read from the semifinal round based on customers' feedback and Publishers Weekly reviews. The 10 finalists selected from this round will be announced on March 3. Customers will then vote to select the winner, to be announced April 7, 2008. The Semi-Finalists' Excerpts and all reviews, including the Publishers Weekly reviews of the full Manuscripts, have been posted online at www.amazon.com/abna. Amazon customers can download and read any Excerpt and the accompanying reviews, and then write their own review and rate the Excerpt using Amazon.com's process for submitting online reviews as described at www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/guidelines/review-guidelines.html.
As an incentive, the three customers who provide the most high quality reviews will be qualified to win one of three customer prizes, including an Amazon kindle reader, $2000 in Amazon gift card value, and an HP photo printer. More information can be found at www.amazon.com/abna.
To review Barb's book, you can go directly to www.amazon.com/dp/B001200C0U. Here's some suggestions from Amazon on writing your review.
What Makes A Good Review?
In the semifinalist round, we're breaking new ground in our customer reviewing community: this is the first opportunity for customers to play an active role in the publishing process. The criteria for judging an unpublished book are a little bit different from the norm. Keep these pointers in mind as you're reading and remember: your voice counts.
Be persuasive. Experts at Penguin will be relying on customer reviews as they prepare to select the finalists, so don't hesitate to tell us what you really think. The reviews that provide the most thorough, thoughtful feedback are the ones that will help Penguin choose the Top Ten.
Quantity and quality help. The more reviews you write, and the more helpful each review is, the more likely you are to win one of our three prize packages.
Discuss. As with customer reviews for all our products, you can comment on others' excerpt reviews and rate them. Any discussion and activity we see around specific titles will only keep us coming back for more, so feel free to speak up and banter with your peers.
One quick heads-up: Per the contest rules, every excerpt is a maximum of 5,000 words in length. As a result, you may find that excerpts vary in length or end unexpectedly. Consider yourself warned--and happy reading!
About The Book
LIBERTY'S JUSTICE, set in Minnesota, pairs Duluth’s Violent Crimes Unit with the FBI to hunt down a cyber crime predator. When a sadistic nightclub owner uses cyberspace to nourish his greed, he needs a network of influential people for protection. But once those individuals deceive him, regardless of how vital they are to his multi-million dollar commodity, they end up dead, especially after someone sends a cryptic e-mail to the FBI.
At first protesting, homicide detective Eve Boden and computer crime specialist Nate Quinn make an uneasy team. Against their better judgments, Boden must infiltrate the illicit world of sex in an undercover role while Quinn zealously strives to track the e-mail back to its source. As the killing continues, their gradual penetration into the high-tech crime world is pointing in many directions. But when a Thai ship enters port with illegal cargo, Boden and Quinn find themselves up against an enormous web of corruption where powerful people who think they can do no wrong commit the worst kind of crime. Desperate, they must surreptitiously disobey their superiors to expose much more than murder. And no matter what it will cost them, they unite to stop the evil and catch a killer unlike any they have pursued before.