For the past two years, I have participated in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) contest. It is a free contest open to fiction writers of multiple genres -- General, YA, SF/F/H, Romance, Mystery/Thriller -- with the grand prize being cash and a publishing contract. I have never progressed very far in the contest (and honestly, I don't expect that I ever will ... at least not with The Stewards of Reed), but I have discovered something arguably better than the grand prize -- I have discovered a community of fellow authors all struggling to get their books out into the world.
Several interesting discussions are raised in the ABNA forums. When the lists of those contestants moving forward in the contest were posted a few weeks ago, it did not take long for folks to start commenting on the titles -- which ones they liked, which ones they didn't. I suspect if my name/title had been on those lists (it wasn't, I was cut at the "pitch" stage ... again <sigh>) folks would not be particularly keen on my title. Truth is, I'm not either.
When I originally devised the title, I was reacting to the frustration of not being able to easily tell the order of books in a series (e.g., Game of Thrones). I figured if I specifically included the series name and volume number in the title, I would save people that frustration. I see now that this was probably unnecessary, and that I am left with a rather long, cumbersome title. If I could go back, I'd probably rename the books as follows: The Steward's Sign; The Dungeons of Cetahl; and The Order of the Ancients. Oh well. Lesson learned.
As I mentioned in a previous post, the drama surrounding the publication of The Dungons of Cetahl drained me -- so much so that I have not written anything in over a month. But the time has come for me to start working in earnest on the third (last?) awkwardly-titled book: The Stewards of Reed, Volume 3: The Order of the Ancients.
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