Sure!

In order to qualify, one has to have never had a book published traditionally. Self-published is okay. It needs to be under about 150k words and over 50k. The actual rules can be found here. However, you have to post more than just your whole manuscript. You have to post an excerpt, which must be the first 3,000 - 5,000 words of your book.

You must also write a pitch, which for some people is the hardest part. It's tough to boil down one's novel into a couple of paragraphs and make it sound intriguing.

When the contest opens, you have a certain period of time to enter before it closes. It also closes when it reaches a fixed number of entrants -- 5,000 in General Literature and 5,000 in Young Adult.

Then you hang tight and wait for the first elimination round. During this round, the editors only look at the pitch, choosing the top 1,000 who will move on. The rest are cut.

The next stage is about a month later, where editors and experts will read and review your excerpt. Two reviewers will answer these questions:

• What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?
• What aspect needs the most work?
• What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?

Each answer is about 100 words or more. These can be brutal, or if you're lucky, very complimentary. They will also rate the excerpt on a scale of 1 - 5 based on Overall Strength of Excerpt, Prose/Style, Plot/Hook, and Originality of Idea. The better the review, the more likely you'll move on to the next round, because that's how Amazon will determine which 250 entries will move on to the next round.

Here were mine:

What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt? The urgency of these opening passages marks this book as special. The author uses the techniques of suspense with skill. Besides providing obstacles for Charlie to navigate en route to his task, he also questions his motivation and ability to complete the task, trying to justify the terrorist act. This is a completely enveloping beginning for the story. What aspect needs the most work? The author needs to proofread out the overuse of adverbs and the overuse of hyphenated adjectives. In addition, the tense shifts can be confusing, so a second look at tense throughout would be helpful to the reader's sense of time. The reference to Charlie as "already a ghost" appears too soon, and the constant use of questions, while true to the character's emergency, are distracting and could be rephrased into his interior monologue. What is your overall opinion of this excerpt? My opinion of this excerpt is "Wow!" This is a book with a bombshell of a beginning set in an exotic location with an unlikely set of circumstances brought to light. Few tourists would feel that they create anything but happiness for Hawaiian natives, and to know that poverty, drugs, and resentment linger in the backstreets is an unexpected twist of true historical fact. What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt? The excerpt slowly but steadily builds the suspense and anticipation to the bombing. The delay because of the accident - Charlie's fear creeping up on him. Will he be able to do it? It immediately drew me in. What aspect needs the most work? Charlie's reasons for doing this need to be explained and understood. Not everyone knows the history of Hawaii and the deep divisions there. What is your overall opinion of this excerpt? The story starts off very dramatically and slowly but steadily rackets up the suspense. Charlie has the possibility of being a sympathetic character who is doing terrible things for what he feels are good reasons.

Now you've made it to the Quarterfinals. After waiting around another month and biting your nails, you will receive your Publisher's Weekly review. This is a longer review of the entire manuscript, and much of the review is a plot summary. These reviews can also be pretty tough if they have negative things to say, because they don't hold back. Once more, the manuscript is rated on a scale of 1 - 5 on basically the same criteria. Your score determines whether you will be one of the lucky 50 who move on to the Semi-Finals.

My Publisher's Weekly Review:

This well-developed work imagines a Hawaii in the aftermath of an act of home-grown terrorism. Meaning to shed light on their cause, returning Hawaii to Hawaiians, the state’s secessionist movement takes the extreme tack of bombing a tourist hotel on Waikiki. The impacts, more far-reaching than the bomber had imagined, unfolds through the stories of three characters: Charlie, a mixed race cab driver who is convinced by members of the Warriors of Freedom to be the bomber; Jeff, a self-important real-estate agent whose life falls apart after the murder of his wife, Anna; and Daniel, the heir to the Hawaiian throne. After the bombing Charlie flees to the mountains where he faces the choice of living by his wits or dying. He isn’t around to see tourists staying away in droves, resulting in the collapse of the island’s economy. For Jeff, the loss of jobs and rising foreclosures have little impact; he has no interest in living. Daniel, who had been running from his heritage, returns home and is pulled into the “Hawaiian Islands, Hawaiian hands” movement, a group with money and political clout. The intertwining of stories is effective, providing a fully developed view of the consequences set in motion by the hotel bombing, and the narrative is cohesive, believable, and well worth a reader’s time.

You've made it pretty far. Only a couple of steps to go, and this is where it gets really intense. About one month later, you'll get a phone call from Amazon to let you know you've been selected as one of the three lucky Finalists. The date of this phone call is provided in the contest rules, so if you don't get a phone call on that date, you know you didn't make it.

The reason they do this instead of announcing it officially like all the other steps is because they need to make sure you get some paperwork back to them on time. Failure to do so means they'll select one of the other Semi-Finalists instead. In other words, they need some time to make sure the Finalists are all going to work out before they make a formal announcement.

Getting that phone call is mind-blowing. Everyone hopes for it, but who really believes they'll get "The Call?" I was visiting my in-laws in California when I got the call, and at first I didn't know what it was about. I'd forgotten about the call (which was good, because overthinking it is too stressful). I thought someone had bought a used book from me and had registered a complaint or something. Then the woman on the other end told me I'd been chosen as a Finalist and I nearly lost it. She told me to reserve the weekend of June 16th, as they will be flying my wife and I to Seattle for the awards ceremony. (More about this later).

The next day I got a phone call from Penguin publishing and was put on a conference call with several bigwigs there. They spent about 20 minutes asking me questions about the origin of my story, inspiration for the characters, etc. I'm sure they're curious, but I think it also serves to let them double-check on the authenticity of the manuscript. This conference call was unexpected, and caught me right at the end of lunch. It's probably a good thing I didn't know it was coming because I would have been too nervous to speak.

A flurry of emails came afterward, with attached paperwork that needs to be filled out and faxed back -- things like non-disclosure agreements (don't worry, I'm not breaking any rules by talking about this process) and a potential publishing contract (which IS covered by the NDA so don't ask). I scrambled to get them all back in a timely fashion.

Okay, so the last step. Once they make the formal announcement of the Finalists, you can announce it yourself (they don't want any Finalists spilling the beans first). Then on the weekend of the award ceremony, they will fly you and one other person to the gala. I'm not sure how much of the process I can tell you here, but I can say all six Finalists (3 in each category) will be reading an excerpt from their novel and briefly discussing it before a large audience. After all this is over, they will announce the winner. From what I gather, they have a poster-sized mockup of a cover (or maybe just the title? Not sure yet) under a sheet, and they remove the sheet as they announce the winner. As you can imagine, the stress is going to be HUGE. I might need some liquor to calm my nerves!

Longer than you wanted, but that's the gist of it. I encourage all aspiring novelists with a complete manuscript to enter. Unlike most contests, this one is free. And it's big. Even if you don't win, many people who make it to the Semi-Finalists or beyond are offered contracts or contacted by other agents. It's well worth an aspiring novelist's time.