28th Free “Dear Lucky Agent” Contest: Memoir

Welcome to the 28th (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. If you’re writing a memoir, then this 28th contest is for you! The contest is live through end of day, Saturday, Dec. 31, 2016. The contest is judged by agent Jennifer Wills of the The Seymour Agency.

(Note that throughout December 2016, there are not one but two “Dear Lucky Agent” contests going on. The other contest is for historical fiction of any kind.)

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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! These contests can’t be missed if you have an eligible submission.

HOW TO SUBMIT

E-mail entries to dearluckyagent28@gmail.com. Please paste all text. The only time to include attachments are when you have to attach images to show your social-media sharing (more info that below).

MEET YOUR (AWESOME) AGENT JUDGE!

Jennifer Wills has five years of experience in some of the publishing industry’s leading literary agencies. She worked with publishers around the world as an assistant in Trident Media Group’s huge foreign rights department, and with domestic publishers as an assistant at Writers House (where, incidentally, she began her career as an intern). She joined The Seymour Agency in April 2016, where she has quickly moved up the ranks to associate agent. Jennifer has always loved helping fledgling authors become New York Times bestsellers and she’s ready to be a relentless champion for her own clients’ work.

Jennifer is interested in a wide range of subjects and genres, and is actively looking to find some excellent memoir clients.

WHAT TO SUBMIT (AND OUR SOCIAL MEDIA REQUIREMENTS)

The first 150-300 words (i.e., your first double-spaced page) of your unpublished, completed memoir. You must include a contact e-mail address with your entry and use your real name. Also note your city of residence (i.e. — the city & state you live in, not your full address). Submit the title of the work and a logline (one-sentence description of the work) with each entry. Self-published memoirs are not eligible.

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! In short, 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://ift.tt/2gu5RKP

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. If you are going to just use Twitter as your 2 entries, please wait one day between mentions to spread out the notices, instead of 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 Memoir http://ift.tt/2gu5RKP Judged by agent @WillsWork4Books, via @chucksambuchino

Check Out These Great Upcoming Writers’ Conferences:

Feb. 11, 2017: Writers Conference of Minnesota (St. Paul, MN)
Feb. 16–19, 2017: San Francisco Writers Conference (San Francisco, CA)
Feb. 24, 2017: The Alabama Writers Conference (Birmingham, AL)
Feb. 25, 2017: Atlanta Writing Workshop (Atlanta, GA)
March 25, 2017: Michigan Writers Conference (Detroit, MI)
March 25, 2017: Kansas Writing Workshop (Kansas City, KS)
April 8, 2017: Philadelphia Writing Workshop (Philadelphia, PA)
April 22, 2017: Get Published in Kentucky Conference (Louisville, KY)
April 22, 2017: New Orleans Writers Conference (New Orleans, LA)
May 6, 2017: Seattle Writers Conference (Seattle, WA)
May 21, 2017: Get Published in San Diego (San Diego, CA)
June 24, 2017: The Writing Workshop of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
July 22, 2017: Tennessee Writers Workshop (Nashville, TN)
Aug. 18–20, 2017: Writer’s Digest Conference (New York, NY)

WHAT IS ELIGIBLE?

Any completed memoir (i.e., life story).

Just a quick note here to be clear that memoir manuscripts should be completely true. There should no fiction involved. Sometimes people say they’ve written a “fictional memoir.” For the record, that is called a novel. When you add fictional elements to a story, it becomes a novel. You should be solidly in one camp or the other. Meanwhile, an autobiography is certainly acceptable for this contest, but just so you know, typically true autobiographies that tell a person’s entire front-to-back life story are used by celebrities and politicians only. Memoirs tend to focus on a shorter span of a person’s life.

CONTEST DETAILS

This contest will be live through the end of December 31, 2016, PST. Winners notified by e-mail within three weeks of end of contest. Winners announced at the top of this blog post at the same time.
To enter, submit the first 150-300 words of your memoir (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 submit only 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. This contest buys no rights, so even if you win, you can still do whatever you like with the work. We do not acquire or own or publish anything.

PRIZES!!!

Top 3 winners each get: 1) A critique of the first 10 double-spaced pages of your work by your agent judge. 2) Their choice of any of Chuck’s two new books out in September 2017 (the Guide to Literary Agents 2017 or the Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market 2017).

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