You may have already heard, but Hardie Grant Egmont has announced that it’s now taking submissions for the Ampersand Project.
Last year the Project accepted YA manuscripts written from a real-life perspective; this year, they’re broadening the scope and are allowing submissions from any genre. That’s great news for new writers, as it gives more of you an opportunity!
See HGE’s website for more information about the Ampersand Project and its submission requirements. Good luck!
Fantastic children’s publisher Hardie Grant Egmont has announced that its Ampersand Project will begin accepting submissions in November for its 2013 collection.
For those unfamiliar with this, the Ampersand Project looks for YA manuscripts set in the real world, written by unpublished authors. I love their commitment to publishing books based on real life, because they’re not so easy to find these days and that’s a shame.
This is a great opportunity for YA authors, so get cracking on those manuscripts because you’ve only got a couple of months!
For more information, go to the Hardie Grant Egmont website.
Writing the beginning of your novel is one of the most challenging, and most important, aspects of writing a novel. Get it wrong and you’ll lose the reader’s interest pretty quickly. Maybe they’ll come back to the book later in the hope it will get better, or maybe they’ll put the book down, never to pick it up again.
For those of you who are having trouble, I just read a great blog post from the Ampersand Project (Hardie Grant Egmont’s project that accepts new submissions from unpublished writers for a period each year – see more on the project here).
The post outlines some fantastic tips from Writer’s Digest on what to avoid when you’re writing your beginning, including opening with a dream or with an alarm clock buzzing, being unintentionally funny, and opening with dialogue.
Take a look at the post, and revisit the opening scene of your novel. Does it need tweaking?
Good luck!
Hardie Grant Egmont has announced the creation of a new series of YA books, called Ampersand, the first of which will be published in early 2013. They are now accepting submissions for stand-alone manuscripts from unpublished authors, with a focus on real life – nothing supernatural! Submissions close on 27 February.
HGE has placed some thorough submission guidelines on their website; see http://hardiegrant.com.au/egmont/contact-us/the-ampersand-collection for details.
