The Soon To Be Famous Blog

The Soon to Be Famous committee is excited to announce those authors whose manuscripts are being advanced to our next round of judging. Here are the semi-finalists (in alphabetical order by book title) for the first annual Soon to Be Famous Illinois Manuscript Project contest. Congratulations to all.

• Clipboard Ready Romance by Judith Wilkie
• Demons of the Night by Amanda Webster
• Forever and Always by Sandy Mosher
• Holidays, Inc by Rachelle Campbell Page
• Imprudent Love by Diane Maciejewski
• Maiden of Dreams by Susan Varno
• Make it Right; Make it Matter by Chiara Talluto
• Masquerade by Joyce A Brown
• Northern Lights by Michael Chatlien
• Recalcitrant Mutation by ES Beidas
• Send Me Dead Flowers by Paul Whittaker
• Shadow Things, Book One: A New Path by A H Hrubes
• Small-Town Monster by James Pressler
• The Color of Trauma by Hollie Smurthwaite
• The Manse Calvo by Brian W Budzynski
• Veritas by Annemarie Mannion
• War Within by Andrew Calin
• Yesterday is Tomorrow by Brian Henkels

These manuscripts now enter our second round of judging by our volunteer Illinois librarians. They'll have the difficult task of narrowing these choices down to three finalists who will then go on to compete for the final top prize.

The winners of the inaugural 2018 Indie Author Project statewide contests have been announced. The Soon to Be Famous winner, Heather Bentley, and her book, Sweetest Heartbreak, now competes with the other winners for top honors to be announced in April 2019.

Get all the details about the other winners here.

Sweetest Heartbreak

Heather Bentley

Fox River Grove Memorial Library

The Soon to Be Famous Illinois Author Manuscript Project is now accepting nominations from authors with unpublished manuscripts from libraries across Illinois. The contest opens November 1, 2018 and closes January 2, 2019. Update 1/3/2019: This contest is now closed to entries and in its judging phase.

The winner receives these valuable prizes:

• Professional line editor who will work with you to polish your novel.
• Professionally designed cover.
• Self-publishing guidance from past STBF winners and committee members.
• Finished book automatically entered as semi-finalist status in the 2020 Soon to Be Famous Illinois Author Project contest.

The contest is open now and closes January 2, 2019. We will accept complete unpublished manuscripts of adult fiction in book length (50,000 to 100,000 words) from Illinois authors.

Librarians: To start the nomination process, click here.

Authors: For details about the contest and how to submit your work to libraries for nomination, click here.

The Project’s ongoing success these past five years made the project organizers think about what else libraries could do to support budding authors. The result: A brand-new Manuscript Project. Read on for more details about this exciting addition.

We thank Library Journal for enabling us to honor those who work as self-published authors in a unique way. They posted the reviews for Heather Bentley and Daniel Rosenberg, STBF's 2018 and 2017 winners. Congratulations Heather and Daniel.

Drumroll please – the librarians have spoken. The 2018 winner of the Soon to be Famous Illinois Author Project is Chicago suburbanite author Heather Bentley.

On Thursday, April 26 we announced the winner of the 2018 contest: Heather Bentley. Here are images and a video from the event.

Here is the archive recording of the live winner announcement from Thursday, April 26 at 1:00 p.m. where we announced who will Soon to be Famous.

Our librarian judges continue to review the books from our three finalists. We will make the winner announcement April 26 at 1:00 p.m. at Fountaindale Public Library.

Our librarian judges have scored the entries. And now we are excited to announce this year’s finalists for the 2018 Soon To Be Famous Illinois Author contest. Congratulations!