August's Winners!

And now for Ms. Bowman’s winners! She also had a few things to say about the entries in general, so I’ll hand things over to her:

This has been a fascinating contest for me--so many of my query decisions are made "from the gut" that it was fun to go through and look at what was really working and not for me.

I was particularly interested to note that there were a lot of great first pages here. In general, in fact, I found the first pages more interesting than the queries. But concept is very important to me (other agents may disagree!). Even on queries where I would read on, just given the first page, if the query letter has given me pause, from issues with the plot or premise, it's not usually worth it for me to read further, because the story as a whole won't work for me. And in my own inbox, I usually just look at query letters for this reason--I want to know where the whole book is going, not just if the prose is good in the first few pages.

That's a long way of saying that there are a lot of great projects here, and I enjoyed looking at all of them. But after going through in detail to critique, I went back through the queries to pick the winners, looking at the writing in both the query and the first page, and also just considering which premises and concepts I was most excited by. I came up with four projects that really stuck in my head from a combination of all those factors.

So without further ado, I'd love to see:

20 pages of:
#19 THE OTHER SIDE

50 pages of:
#16 HOPE IN BLOOM

and 100 pages of:
#9 WARWICK HALL
#17 CAN'T BUY ME LOVE

Thank you all for participating, and thanks to Krista for hosting! And I'll add--if you didn't win in the contest, feel free to revise your query and re-query me with it; I'm always happy to take a second look.

Yay! Winners, please e-mail me at kvandolzer(at)gmail(dot)com for specific instructions on how to submit your materials. And as always, thank you, thank you, thank you to Ms. Bowman and everybody who entered, critiqued, or just lurked in the shadows:) Couldn’t run these contests without you!