Amazon have just announced the launch of a new £20,000 prize for authors publishing their books on Kindle. This prize, called The Kindle Storyteller Award, is open to all authors, including authors from Ireland. Books can be in any genre, but must be in the English language and at least 5,000 words long. Eligible books must be published for the first time between 20 February 2017 and 19 May 2017. The full terms and conditions are available here.

Some things to note for authors:

• To be eligible, books must also be enrolled in the KDP Select programme until at least the end of the entry period. This will mean that your book is available exclusively through Amazon KDP for that time. As by far most ebooks are purchased through Kindle anyway, though, this shouldn’t be too much of a concern.
• The book cannot have been previously published in any other language.
• The author of the winning book must be willing to exclusively allow Amazon to publish an edition of the book in one language other than English, for which the author will be paid in accordance with Amazon Publishing’s standard terms.
• In order to enter your book for this competition, you will need to enter the following code into the keyword metadata when you’re uploading your book: StorytellerUK2017.

The five finalists will be notified on 2 June, and the winner will be announced on 30 June. From what we can see, there’s no downside at all so we would recommend any authors planning to publish on KDP during that time to get involved.

For any prospective authors entering this competition, Carrowmore will be offering a 10% discount on copyediting and cover design also. Just include the same code (StorytellerUK2017) in your email.

The best of luck too!