World’s best story?

Best story in the world?

That’s a difficult one. It’s hard enough to narrow those sort of lists down to ten or even twenty.

But Canadians Vincent Salera and Thomas Lefebvre have launched a competition to find the world’s best story.

It’s a well-thought through competition and looks at books by genre and analysis of plot, characters, and even spelling and grammar, to name just a few criteria.

There are a couple of qualifying rounds where readers vote for favourites, and the final round involves professional judges, ie authors, as well as readers.

I heard about this through iRead Book Tours and thought it was an interesting competition, so have agreed to promote it, and no, I’m not getting paid for doing so.

And being a nosy little journalist, as well as a very picky editor, I also agreed to interview Vincent and Thomas, as I wanted to dig beneath the PR.

But first, I asked Laura Fabiani of iRead Book Tours, why she became involved as a partner.

“Laura, what made you decide to partner with World’s best story? Why did you think it was such a good idea?”

I met Thomas, one of the creators at BookExpo America (BEA) last May, when he overheard me say that I was from Montreal. Both Thomas and Vincent are from Montreal too and we hit it off immediately when we started talking books, contests and publishing. Thomas and Vincent were happy to discover I was a book blogger and tour coordinator. They asked me my opinion on the subjects of book bloggers, publishing and the influence of readers on the success of a book. These guys were buzzing with energy and great ideas, it was infectious!

“When they asked if I wanted to be a partner and sponsor prizes for World’s best story, I was honoured. I was supporting a Canadian literary project and helping writers who may potentially never get discovered otherwise to have a chance at publication. And not only written publication but in other categories too, like television and film. I think this contest has a lot of potential and I’d like to say that I was there from the very beginning.

I should say here that I have signed up to review books/interview authors with iRead Book Tours. That’s mainly because as a reviewer I’m not restricted to writing a totally favourable review, I can write an honest one, so that to me, suggests integrity and is one of the main reasons I chose this company. Not that I’ve reviewed any books yet. And although largely North American based, Laura also has an Italian interest and promotes books about Italy, so there’s a nice European focus too. (Links to IRead Book Tours, and Italy Book Tours are at the bottom with World’s best story link)

But back to the search for the world’s best story.

The most important things to note are that it is open to residents of: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK and USA, the deadline is 12 August for submitting an entry, and your story needs to be between 50,000 and 125,000 words.

If you can tick those three boxes, then it might be worth ploughing through the rules and the small print and submitting an entry.

It’s free to enter and prizes include publishing contracts, celebrity master classes, trademark and IP protection, book tours, big box retail distribution, PR and marketing support.

And if you are a reader, all you need to do is send your name and email to register to read the entries.