Welcome to the 19th (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 any kind of young adult fiction, this 19th contest is for you! (The contest is live through EOD, Thursday, Oct. 26, 2015.)

UPDATE: ERIC HAS CHOSEN 3 WINNERS, AND ALL

HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED BY EMAIL.

Winners (no order): 1) Sociopop by Annette Christie

2) Checkmate by Jaime Olin

3) Spontaneous Combustion by Sara Alan

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In celebration of my three new books released this September (what an awesome fall!), I'm going to waste no time in bringing you yet another awesome & free Dear Lucky Agent Contest. All details below.

When Clowns Attack: A Survival Guide is an anti-clown humor book that teaches you how to defend yourself against these red-nosed bozos who plague us. It's a perfect gift for that clown-hating friend in your life. Find it on Amazon or through Barnes & Noble or anywhere else books are sold. The 2016 Guide to Literary Agents is a big database of agents -- who they are, what they want, how to submit and more. Find it in the Writer's Digest Shop or anywhere else books are sold. The 2016 Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market has oodles of markets (agents, publishers, etc.) for writers & illustrators of children's books -- from picture books to middle grade to young adult. Find it in the Writer's Digest Shop or anywhere else books are sold.

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Welcome to the 19th (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 any kind of young adult fiction, this 19th contest is for you! (The contest is live through EOD, Thursday, Oct. 29, 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 dearluckyagent19@gmail.com [this email went active as of 9 am Monday morning]. 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 young adult fiction (all categories of YA are acceptable). 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/nz6n2p8 [this links is updated as of Monday morning -- sorry]. 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 Young Adult fiction http://tinyurl.com/nz6n2p8 Judged by agent @ericsmithrocks, via @chucksambuchino

WHAT IS ELIGIBLE?

Completed young adult novels (any category is acceptable, from quiet contemporary to loud sci-fi and fantasy).

Please note that this is a contest for young adult fiction only. So if your book has a main character who is not in high school, it would not qualify for this contest. Sorry.

CONTEST DETAILS

This contest will be live through the end of Oct 29, 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) Their choice of any of Chuck's 3 new books (mentioned at the top).

MEET YOUR (AWESOME) AGENT JUDGE!

Eric Smith is a literary agent with P.S. Literary. He is the author of the YA novel INKED (Bloomsbury Spark) as well as the nonfiction humor book THE GEEK'S GUIDE TO DATING. (See all the ways to buy his books here.) Along with Tim Quirino, he’s the co-founder of Geekadelphia, a hyperlocal blog in Philadelphia, covering all-that-is-geek in the City of Brotherly Love. In 2011, he co-founded the Philadelphia Geek Awards with the Academy of Natural Sciences, a ceremony honoring local geeks. Before he joined P.S. Literary, Eric could be found at Quirk Books, an indie publishing house in Philadelphia. A native of New Jersey (don’t hate), he currently lives in Philadelphia. You can find him on Twitter at @ericsmithrocks and @geekadelphia. His writing is represented by Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary.

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