Off to the Next Contest!

Black King Takes White Queen made it pretty far in the recent OZMA book AWARD making it to the finalist list for the shortlisted novels, and then being shortlisted in the group of novels from which the five finalists were selected for the Grand Prize award. I was excited and happy to have my novel selected twice in the process, and of course disappointed it didn't go further, but I'm not complaining. It did a lot better than I had imagined it would when I entered it at the last moment last October 30th!

Because of it's modest success in that contest, it was my obvious choice for the Writer's Digest Self Published Book Awards contest in the genre fiction category. After a gut-wrenching realization that I had failed to edit out all the words that ended up hyphenated in the middle of a sentence when the interior text was recently revised and justified to make it line up down both sides of the page (but only in the first half of the novel, for whatever reason!), I had to scramble to pull the book one more time, fix the issues inside, and then changed the green title band and back cover to earthy brown and the title and back cover text color to spring green because it was difficult to read the black print on the green, and that was an issue that was pointed out to me last year when I entered two novels in the contest- the covers needed attention (they loved the stories).

The amended book arrived today! It is going out in tomorrow's mail to meet the postmarked by May 1st deadline. Talk about cutting it close!!

The book as it stands right now- on Amazon, is the best version available. I'm done tinkering with it!

Moving on to my next project!