18th Free “Dear Lucky Agent” Contest: Thriller / Mystery / Suspense
If you are coming to this post looking for the YA contest, find it here: http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/19th-free-dear-lucky-agent-contest-young-adult-fiction ————————– UPDATE: Michelle Richter chose the winners:Sarah Diviney, Katherine Tomlinson, and Georgia.Congratulations to them,…
If you are coming to this post looking for the YA contest, find it here:
--------------------------
UPDATE: Michelle Richter chose the winners:
Sarah Diviney, Katherine Tomlinson, and Georgia.
Congratulations to them, and thank you to all who
entered this contest.
-------------------------
Welcome to the 18th (free!) “Dear Lucky Agent” Contest on the GLA blog. This is a FREE 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 mystery or thriller or suspense, this 18th contest is for you! (The contest is live through EOD, Thursday, Sept. 17, 2015.)
WHY YOU SHOULD GET EXCITED
After a previous “Dear Lucky Agent” contest, the agent judge, Tamar Rydzinski (The Laura Dail Literary Agency), signed one of the three contest winners. After Tamar signed the writer, she went on to sell two of that writer’s books! How cool! That’s why these contests are not to missed if you have an eligible submission.
HOW TO SUBMIT
E-mail entries to dearluckyagent18@gmail.com. Please paste everything. No attachments.
WHAT TO SUBMIT (AND OUR SOCIAL MEDIA REQUIREMENTS)
The first 150-250 words (i.e., your first double-spaced page) of your unpublished, completed book-length work of thriller / mystery / suspense fiction. 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 each entry.
Please note: To be eligible to submit, you must mention this contest twice through any any social-media. Please provide a social-media link or Twitter handle or screenshot or blog post URL, etc., with your official e-mailed entry so the judge and I can verify eligibility. Some previous entrants could not be considered because they skipped this step! Simply spread the word twice through any means and give us a way to verify you did; a tinyURL for this link/contest for you to easily use is http://tinyurl.com/nk2pk9e. An easy way to notify me of your sharing is to include my Twitter handle @chucksambuchino at the end of your mention(s) if using Twitter. If we're friends on FB, tag me in the mention. And if you are going to solely use Twitter as your 2 times, please wait 1 day between mentions to spread out the notices, rather than simply tweeting twice back to back. Thanks. (Please note that simply tweeting me does not count. You have to include the contest URL with your mention; that's the point. And if you use Twitter, put my handle @chucksambuchino at the middle or the end, not at the very beginning of the tweet, or else the tweet will be invisible to others.)
Here is a sample TWEET you can use (feel free to tweak): New FREE contest for writers of thriller / mystery / suspense http://tinyurl.com/nk2pk9e Judged by agent @michrichter1, via @chucksambuchino
WHAT IS ELIGIBLE?
1. Completed adult thriller novels.
2. Completed adult mystery novels.
3. Completed adult suspense books.
Please note that these are all adult genre categories. So if your book is fundamentally a romance or sci-fi or literary fiction but happens to have some thrills in it, it would not qualify for this contest. Sorry.
Please note that YA fiction is not eligible for this (i.e., no teen/kid protagonists).
CONTEST DETAILS
- This contest will be live through the end of Sept. 17, 2015, PST. Winners notified by e-mail within three weeks of end of contest. Winners announced at the top of this blog post thereafter.
- To enter, submit the first 150-250 words of your book (i.e., your first double-spaced page). Shorter or longer entries will not be considered. Keep it within word count range please.
- You can submit as many times as you wish. You can submit even if you submitted to other contests in the past, but please note that past winners cannot win again. All that said, you are urged to only submit your best work.
- The contest is open to everyone of all ages, save those employees, officers and directors of GLA’s publisher, F+W: A Content and E-Commerce Company, Inc.
- 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 any terms possibly added by me in the “Comments” section of this blog post. (If you have questions or concerns, write me personally at chuck.sambuchino (at) fwmedia.com. The Gmail account above is for submissions, not questions.)
PRIZES!!!
Top 3 winners all get: 1) A critique of the first 10 double-spaced pages of your work, by your agent judge. 2) A free one-year subscription to WritersMarket.com ($50 value)! 3) A copy of my 2015 book, Get a Literary Agent.
MEET YOUR (AWESOME) AGENT JUDGE!
Michelle Richter joined Fuse Literary after eight years at St. Martin’s Press. While there, she edited nonfiction including MELISSA EXPLAINS IT ALL by Melissa Joan Hart and RENEWABLE by Jeremy Shere, and worked on women’s fiction, memoir/ biography, pop culture, cookbooks, and diet/health books. She has a M.S. in Publishing from Pace University, and a B.A. in Economics with a minor in Russian from UMass Boston. Michelle is primarily seeking fiction, especially book club reads, women’s fiction, literary fiction, and mystery/suspense/thrillers. Her favorite authors include Ann Patchett, Emma Straub, Laura Lippman, Richard Russo, Tom Perrotta, and Gillian Flynn. For nonfiction, she’s interested in fashion, pop culture, science/medicine, sociology/social trends, and economics. You can follow Michelle on Twitter at @michrichter1.
LEARN MORE ABOUT SOME OF FUSE LITERARY'S SALES
YOU'RE AS GOOD AS DEAD
By E.A. Aymar
"Baltimore professor and single dad Tom Starks is forced to navigate a deadly path between warring crime families and ruthless federal agents after witnessing the assassination of an influential crime boss."
RIP TIDES
By Toby Neal
"Detective Lei Texeira plunges into a high-profile case whose dark and tangled motives reach deep into the elite world of professional surfing on the North Shore of Oahu."
BROKEN HOMES & GARDENS
By Rebecca Kelley
"When Harry Met Sally meets Portlandia. Roommates Joanna and Malcolm rehab a broken-down home and discover what it means to create a home without marriage or the picket fence, risking their friendship for something more."
Chuck Sambuchino is a former editor with the Writer's Digest writing community and author of several books, including How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack and Create Your Writer Platform.
