Hot news from the NYTimes:

Joining the growing list of publishers that use public votes to decide what to publish, Penguin Group is teaming with Amazon.com and Hewlett Packard for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. From today through Nov. 5, contestants from 20 countries can submit unpublished manuscripts of English-language novels to Amazon, which will assign a small group of its top-rated online reviewers to evaluate 5,000-word excerpts and narrow the field to 1,000. The full manuscripts of those semifinalists will be submitted to Publishers Weekly, which will assign reviewers to each. Amazon will post the reviews, along with excerpts, online, where customers can make comments. Using those comments and the magazine’s reviews, Penguin will winnow the field to 100 finalists who will get two readings by Penguin editors.

Want to know more about this huge new contest? Check out Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award page HERE.

If that weren’t enough, Borders has also announced a new contest. From USA Today:

Borders Group Inc., Court TV and Gather.com announced The Next Great Crime Novel competition, with the winner receiving $5,000 and a publishing deal through Borders, the superstore chain.

“Driving quality manuscript submissions is the key to any successful writing contest,” Borders’ executive vice president for merchandising and marketing, Rob Gruen, said in a statement. “This puts Borders in a unique position to make a dream come true for an aspiring and deserving writer.”

More HERE.

Write on, all!

Therese Walsh co-founded Writer Unboxed in 2006. Her debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy, sold to Random House in a two-book deal in 2008, was named one of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2009, and was a Target Breakout Book in 2010. She's never been published with a lit magazine, but LOST's Carlton Cuse liked her haiku best on Twitter, and that made her pretty happy.
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