The results of the YouWriteOn.com Book of the Year Awards will be announced in early June 2009. 

Previous YouWriteOn Book Award entrants and winners have achieved great success, including Doug Jackson’s Caligula, which Doug developed on YouWriteOn, achieving a six figure book deal with Random House. Children’s Book Winner Bob Burke achieved a book deal with Harper Collins for his book The Third Pig Detective Agency, and Book of the Year Award Winner Patti De Lois, first published by YouWriteOn, achieved a two book deal with Penguin for her novel Bufflehead Sisters. See below for pictures of their books.

We believe that the eligible entrants on YouWriteOn were at a similarly high standard of writing as the above writers and winners, and that this year’s results will similarly see writers making the leap to mainstream publishing success. The quality of the writing, and feedback from readers, means it’s bound to happen for further YouWriteOn writers in 2009.

The Contenders  Click here to search and view the Best Seller Chart entries for 2008. This includes January 2009 Best Seller Chart entries, which were the highest rated Best Seller Chart entries for December 2008.


For an opportunity to be eligible for next year’s Book of the Year Awards in 2010, simply join YouWriteOn.com for free and upload your opening chapters or short stories. Each month the highest rated books receive feedback from editors for leading publishers, such as Orion and Random House, whose authors include John Grisham, Bill Bryson and Ian Rankin. These stories enter the YouWriteOn BestSellers Chart and are then eligible for our Book of the Year Awards in the next year.

We believe story development is key to helping towards publishing success. Collective reviews help to highlight what works well and what needs development in a story from a range of reviewers. Most highly rated stories usually reach our Top Ten within 4 to 6 weeks of being uploaded, and YouWriteOn is a fast-track for talented writers to get feedback from leading publishers.

 

Scotland’s leading newspaper’s Literary Editor writes about YouWriteOn and about YWO member - and now Random House author - Doug Jackson:

".. for the very best there's the reward that induced many writers to submit their stories to the English Arts Council-funded site in the first place: the chance of their work being critically assessed by an editor at a major London publishing house.

That's what happened to The Emperor's Elephant (now entitled Caligula). And as Jackson told me about it, I became fascinated: this, I could see, was a publishing innovation that even many people in the industry hadn't latched on to. Because it's all done on the internet, and because restrained criticism seems to desert us in cyberspace, appraisals can be raw and often hurtful, but a good story can find itself propelled up the site's popularity chart by equally uncompromising raves.

Here, for the first time, Jackson found himself learning from other writers. So they thought his opening 10,000-word submission didn't live up the book's title, didn't get to the meat of the plot soon enough? Very well, he'd rewrite it and submit it again. The second time, it worked: he was rewarded with a trail of five-star reviews. The site's organisers put him in touch with Sarah O'Keefe, an editor with Orion, who read the whole novel.

O'Keefe liked it, but wanted still less of a linear structure and even more detailed plotting at the novel's core. It should not be just one book telling Rufus's life story, but at least two. For the first, he should concentrate on the Caligula years, showing how Rufus finds himself in a maze of conspiracies, unable to work out whom to trust.

If youwriteon.com had crystallised what the book should be about, O'Keefe's advice focused it further. Essentially, she was outlining a different book entirely . It had to remain a page-turner, but a more complex one: readers had not only to feel they were in Rome, but feel an edge of fear as Rufus found himself enmeshed in political intrigue against a psychopathic emperor, set to end in a grisly death.

By this stage, Jackson had acquired an agent, who set up an auction for the book – now called Caligula – with seven publishers. A pre-emptive bid by Simon Thorogood of Transworld won the book for them.

Publishing may be a gambler's industry, but it's not altogether insane. To understand why Thorogood bet so heavily on Jackson, you have to understand that Caligula is a rare beast: a book written with irresistible pace but also a slowly growing sense of unease. For the nearer Rufus gets to the psychopathic heart of imperial Rome, the more he has to guess whose side he should take. The wrong choice – or in Caligula's corrupt, compromised, paranoid court, even the slightest suspicion of the wrong choice – would prove fatal."

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