”Dear Lucky Agent” Contest: Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance (For Both Teens and Adults)

Note from Chuck: It's March 15, 2010, which means this contest
is now closed. Thank you for entering. Winners
should be announced within 7 days or so.
Meanwhile, our next contest should start
within a week or two, as well.

------------------------------

"Dear Lucky Agent" Contest:

Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Romance

Welcome to the third"Dear Lucky Agent" Contest on the GLA blog. This will be a recurring online contest with agent judges and super-cool prizes. Here's the deal: With every contest, the details are essentially the same, but the niche itself changes—meaning each contest is focused around a specific category or two. So if you're writing a novel-length work of urban fantasy or paranormal romance, this third contest is for you!

HOW TO SUBMIT

E-mail entries to thirdagentcontest@gmail.com. Please paste everything. No attachments. (Also note that I do not check this account. Only the agent does. Looking back over old e-mails, some people have wrote to say hi to me, or perhaps ask a question. Contact me at literaryagent@fwmedia.com.)

WHAT TO SUBMIT

The first 150-200 words of your unpublished, book-length work of urban fantasy or paranormal romance (adult or YA - both accepted).

Joanna says: "Please keep it to these two subgenres specifically. While you can incorporate a variety of fantasy elements, they still have to fall under these two categories. For those of you who are unsure, keep in mind that both urban fantasy and paranormal romance have a strong base in a real world setting (like Jim Butcher's Dresden Files or J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood or Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy). So no stories that take place solely on another planet or world!"

You must include a contact e-mail address with your entry and use your real name. Also, submit the title of the work and a logline (one-sentence description of the work) with your entry.

Please note: To be eligible to submit, I ask that you do one of two things: 1) Mention and link to this contest twice through your social media - blogs, Twitter, Facebook; or 2) just mention this contest once and also add Guide to Literary Agents Blog (www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog) to your blogroll. Please provide link(s) so I can verify eligibility.

CONTEST DETAILS

1. This contest will be live for approximately fifteen days - from Feb. 27, 2010 through the end of Sunday, March. 14, 2010 EST. Winners notified by e-mail within seven days of end of contest. Winners announced on the blog thereafter.
2.To enter, submit the first 150-200 words of your book. Shorter or longer entries will not be considered. Keep it within word count range please.
3.This contest is solely for completed book-length works of urban fantasy and paranormal romance (either adult or YA). To know more about what falls into these genres, look at the bold text above.
4.You can submit as many times as you wish. 
5.The contest is open to everyone of all ages, save those employees, officers and directors of GLA's publisher, F+W Media.
6. There are more rules (most of them dealing with legal stuff) that you can find in the comments section of this post. 
7. By e-mailing your entry, you are submitting an entry for consideration in this contest and thereby agreeing to the terms written here as well as the terms added by me at the beginning of the "Comments" section of this blog post.

PRIZES!!!

First place: 1) A critique of 20 pages of your work, by your agent judge. 2) A one-year subscription to WritersMarket.com.

Runner-ups - second and third place: 1) A critique of 10 pages of your work, by your agent judge. 2) A one-year subscription to WritersMarket.com.

MEET YOUR (AWESOME) JUDGE!

Joanna Stampfel-Volpe is an agent with Nancy Coffey Literary. Books she's repped include:

Pieces of Sky, by Kaki Warner. This award-winning, Romantic Times Top Pick debut novel is the first book in Warner's Blood Rose trilogy (Berkley, January 2010)

Haunting Emma, Book One: Deception by Lee Nichols (Bloomsbury Children's, June 2010)

The Town that Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food by Ben Hewitt (Rodale, March 2010)

Want more information?