The first submission round of Mills and Boon’s New Voices competition closed with a bang yesterday and a whopping 1092 entries! That’s 271 more than in 2010 and it's now up to the judges to whittle that down to twenty.
Good luck to them!
As Madeline Ash pointed out, the Top Twenty will make up less than 2% which should indicate just how important it is to submit your story no matter what the results are.
The category percentages have also changed and stand at:
Contemporary Romance (50.3%)
Warm and Cosy (11.7%)
Historical (11.1%)
Paranormal (10.3%)
Romantic Suspense (9.4%)
Passion (7.2%)
I'm very impressed by the number of aspiring historical writers. Perhaps we'll see a historical entry or two in the top twenty this year. What do you think?
So, there's a whole 2 days, 8 hours, 25 minutes and 10 seconds until the Top Twenty announcement. Of course you can spend that time obsessively checking your entry and reading others, but if you'd also like to have something to do to keep your mind off the life changing news that could be coming your way I have some ideas...
1. Bestselling romance author, Nicola Marsh, is running a one week pitch competition in which you can win critiques by her and senior editor of Entangled Publishing, Liz Pelletier. You can find the details here.
2. The 26th Annual Hook, Line and Sinker competition has also launched to help you hone your skills for grabbing editor and agent’s attention. Find out more here.
Do you know of any other competitions in the works? Please let me know so I can add them to the list.
Good luck to all the NV entrants and happy writing/OCD inbox checking!
