James River Writers is pleased to announce that the final judge for the Best Unpublished Novel competition will be Maya Payne Smart. Maya is a writer and literacy ambassador who shares reviews, interviews, and musings at MayaSmart.com and BookRiot.com. She served on the boards of the YWCA of Richmond and The Community Foundation serving Richmond and Central Virginia. She also raised funds and awareness for numerous local nonprofits including FRIENDS Association for Children and The Richmond Christmas Mother Fund. She is a former chair of James River Writers and served on the national board of governors of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Her honors include Style Weekly’s 40 under 40 Award and an Excellence in Journalism Award from The Press Club of Cleveland.
James River Writers runs the Best Unpublished Novel Contest in conjunction with Richmond magazine. (In even numbered years JRW and Richmond magazine run the Shann Palmer Best Poetry Contest.) Submissions are now closed. The deadline for postmarking your entry for the Best Unpublished Novel Contest was March 31, 2015. Entries will go through the judging process in April and May, and we will be contacting those who submitted in late June. Thank you to everyone who is participating!
Contest Details
First submit the entry fee of $25 using the “Register Today” button below and a credit card. Once you have submitted payment, you will receive a receipt via email. Print your receipt and follow the guidelines below to mail in your submission.
Writers may submit the first 50 pages of a previously unsubmitted novel. Submissions must be mailed with your receipt for the entry fee (see above), postmarked no later than March 31, 2015, to:
Richmond Magazine
Best Unpublished Novel Contest
2201 West Broad Street, Suite 105
Richmond, VA 23220
The first-prize winner receives $500, publication of an excerpt in the September issue of Richmond Magazine, a ticket to the annual James River Writers Conference (October 17-18, 2015), and feedback on the manuscript. Two finalists each receive $200.
Rules
To submit an entry, the author must be a resident of Virginia, a student at a Virginia college or university, or a member of JRW. Richmond Magazine and JRW employees and board members cannot enter.
Your manuscript must be a work of fiction.
Work may not have been published prior to contest submission. This includes self-publishing, small press publishing, print on demand, and publishing the work on a blog or website. If your work is accepted for publication before September of 2015 (Congratulations!), please let us know so that we may remove it from consideration. (If you have self-published a book, you may want to consider the Best Self-published Book Contest, which will return in 2016.)
Each submission must have a cover sheet with the author’s name, contact information (include email, mailing address, and phone number) and the novel’s title. The author’s name can appear only on this cover sheet, not on any other pages. Manuscripts will be disqualified if submitted with authors’ names or other identifying information on any page other than the cover sheet.
Each page of the manuscript must have the title in the upper left corner, page numbers in the upper right, and be double-spaced with one-inch margins in Times New Roman or Arial font, size 12. Please print only on one side of the page. Please use standard 8 1/2″ x 11″ white paper with nothing printed on the back. Submissions will be returned only if accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope (optional).
Full manuscripts will be requested later if the submission passes the first round of judging. Please do not submit duplicates of manuscripts entered in previous years.