Well, I’d like to say I won the whole thing and I’d just got back from New York with my shiny new book contract, but that would be a lie and furthermore would deny the reality of the book publishing marketplace.
All five semi-finalists for the Amazon book contest were mainstream books. To quickly define that genre, it’s about real people in a real time on this world. One of them, I think, was set in the past, but the others were modern day-type books. This highlights something that I should have known all along. The biggest chunk of book sales by far is taken up by mainstream novels. So to think that my fantasy book or anyone’s genre book had a chance in the contest was beyond absurd. I was blinded by my hope for winning the contest, but in truth I didn’t have a chance even in my own category. I got five reviews and some fantasy books got in the hundreds. People like their fantasy, very FANTASY-y and that was reflected in the reviews. Some of the book excerpts that got 5 star reviews were almost ridiculously terrible. I’m not saying mine was anything great and might well have been between a 2-3 star. I’d like to think 3… These books were incredibly derivative while at the same time were shadows of what they were trying to imitate.
That’s my bitter rant about the unfairness of the Amazon contest.
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