Congratulations to all!
The Strongest Start Novel Competition is the only “work-in-progress” online novel competition that we are aware of. It allows writers to submit books-in-progress and edit their entries as they receive feedback from the community. The Competition’s goal is to provide you, the writer, with the feedback and motivation you need to edit and improve your opening chapters and ultimately finish your book. This year, the submitted entries received over 2,500 reviews from other writers and readers.
Erin Brown is a professional editor and has worked at several large New York publishing houses. She began her publishing career at HarperCollins Publishers, where she worked for over six years in virtually every genre, including mystery, romance, literary fiction, women’s commercial fiction and non-fiction. She was privileged to work with numerous bestselling authors including J.A. Jance, Bruce Feiler, Elizabeth Peters, Jerrilyn Farmer, Lawrence Block, Carolyn Hart, Mary Daheim, and many more. Most recently, she was part of the fabulous St. Martin’s Press team as an editor with the Thomas Dunne Books imprint. There, she enjoyed acquiring fabulous debut novels and editing such bestselling authors as Carole Matthews, Madeleine Wickham (a.k.a. Sophie Kinsella), Homer Hickam, Jincy Willett, Robin Pilcher, and many more. 
Paul Bagdon has published 30 novels.Deserter (Dorchester/Leisure) was released in December 2006 and Northern Hearts (Baker Publishing) was released February 1 under the pen name Paige Lee Eliston. He is an instructor at the Writers Digest Online Workshop and his critiques and reviews of manuscripts provided to him by Writers Digest have appeared dozens of times in the last few years. He enjoys working with writers and several of his students have sold novels, short stories, and articles.
Ed Aubry (known on TheNextBigWriter by his pen name, Sherman Bierce) is the winner of last year’s Strongest Start Novel Competition for his first novel, Static Mayhem. Static Mayhem was also a semi-finalist in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award contest in 2008 He lives in Rural Pennsylvania with his wife and three daughters, where he has taught high school math for the past twelve years. He is currently working on his second novel, Caprice. 
