Our friend and neighbor Kay Newton has penned a novel, Cotton Tales, and needs your help. Her novel has made it into the quarterfinalists of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Competition.

Direct link to her entry, where you can review it, is here.

She needs your ratings and your review, plus you get to read two chapters of her compelling novel for free. More below, including a note from Kay herself about the difficulty of achieving what she already has.

Here is one of the reviews:

WOW! "Cotton Tales" must be a sensational novel if this excerpt is an indication of what to expect. It punches you in the guts within the first few pages, and leaves you breathless at the end, angry that the excerpt is so short. What a debut! Lizzie sold bootleg whiskey to mostly white men in a respectable thirties-vintage brick bungalow, neatly painted and with a well-kept yard. She entertained her customers on the back porch, with drinks, talk and cards: she played gin rummy, her daughter Lorene gave card readings..

continued...

Occasionally a guest would turn into a trouble-maker. One Sunday a handsome red-haired man with blood shot eyes, in a too-familiar manner asked for bourbon. After some conversation, the red-headed man learned that Lorene gave card readings, and demanded that she read for him. Alone with Lorene, he told her intimate details about her life, information she guessed he gleaned from her ex-boyfriend. She vaguely recalled her boyfriend mentioning a white guy with red hair called Ellis. As she proceeded with the card reading, he grabbed her, telling her "You're gonna have a fine time in the sack with ole Ellis." She screamed like a banshee and the scene ended. Fast-forward one day. Courtesy of Lorene's friends, Ellis is beaten to a pulp and banging on the trailer door of his best friend, Little Rock's home. Ruth, his friend's wife took him inside, tended his wounds, and despite her initial unwillingness, Ellis seduced her. She cleaned herself hoping that her husband would not suspect. This is a page-turner par excellence and is absolutely bound to be a best-seller.

And a note from Kay:

Hi, Friends,

My novel has made it into the quarterfinalists of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Competition. This is a lot like playing the lottery, only there was no fee. I made it through the first round of judging, meaning that my odds improved from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 2,000. Then I made it through the second round, so now they are 1 in 500, and the time has come to ask all my friends to read my excerpt on Amazon and give it a reader's rating (and a review if you like). The problem is that about the same time I was put into the semifinalists, my entire email address book disappeared, and the only addresses I could retrieve were those whose emails were still in my inbox. You were one of those lucky ones. I can use all the help I can get, so please tell anybody who might be interested about this. To give my novel excerpt a rating, please go to amazon.com/abna, follow their link to the "General Literature" quarterfinalists, go to page 16 of those, and scroll down till you come to # 182, Kay Newton's COTTON TALES (boy, did my heart slowly sink as I scrolled through the first pages looking for myself--I'd about decided to change careers and become an opera singer). I believe--AND HOPE--that 182 is just a number, not a ranking, since many entries preceding mine got lower (if any) ratings and/or reviews. You will see that there are two reviews given by a couple of Amazon people; the first reviewer seemed unaware that bootleggers exist wherever and whenever there's a dry county--not just during Prohibition (duh!), and the second reviewer, while raving, didn't seem to know the difference between a review and a plot summary. There are also four reviews by other people.

Thanks,

Kay