Well, Amazon have now made available the ABNA Excerpts as free kindle downloads at the various international sites. For Scenes from a Life, navigate to one of:
- Amazon UK (www.amazon.co.uk/Scenes-From-Life-2014-Entry-ebook/dp/B00JOU2ZR8/)
- Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/Scenes-From-Life-2014-Entry-ebook/dp/B00JOU2ZR8/)
- Amazon India (http://www.amazon.in/Scenes-From-Life-2014-Entry-ebook/dp/B00JOU2ZR8/)
- I am sure other worldwide Amazon sites follow the same pattern but have not checked
On the Amazon sites you can preview the first couple of pages, or download in kindle format the Excerpt for free. The Excerpt for Scenes from a Life was about 3750 words long – the upper limit was 5000 words, but I wanted to end the Excerpt at an obvious section break. It represents part but not all of Chapter 1.
You do not need an actual kindle device to read it as there are kindle viewers for all kinds of other platforms such as PC, Mac and so on.
Like any other purchase on Amazon, you can add your own reviews of the Excerpt. It’s not very clear how audience reviews feed into the next stage – the main judging is done by staff from Publishers Weekly who have access to the entire manuscript now. However, in addition to this “Amazon customers can download, rate, and review Excerpts on Amazon.com, providing feedback to Amazon Publishing Editors about submissions”. So if anybody is motivated to write such a review, I would very much appreciate it. There is about a month for this stage of the process, until May 23rd or thereabouts, and the names of those going through to the semi-finals are announced around June 13th.