Join Our Quest. Find Your Story!

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Common Deer Press is on a mission to find and publish extraordinary and enduring books for children and teens. Books that change lives. Books that build bridges, connect cultures, transcend differences and, by showing the humanity in others, open hearts. We believe that when you captivate a child with books, worlds of possibilities open up to them. Books widen the aperture of what a child’s life can become. 

 

Last year, we introduced our annual writing competition, The Uncommon Quest. The judging is anonymous, the opportunities are equal for debut and seasoned writers alike. After all, every great writer of juvenile fiction was a debut novelist at one point! The independent panel, comprised of professional writers, librarians, and educators, has no idea whether the author has a publishing history, an agent, or a platform. Each manuscript is judged strictly on its own merit.

 

The effectiveness of this approach was borne out by the recent staggering win of Broken Shards of Time, a dazzling debut YA sci-fi, written by 14-year-old Nyah Nichol! An excerpt of this astonishing book is available HERE.

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Our 2019 competition was Canada-wide, and we had entries from across the country. Each winning author has received a cash prize plus a publishing contract. All three winning books will be published in Fall 2020.

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With your support, we can make this competition international! We have already increased the prize money for next year, and each 2020 winner, Gold, Silver, and Bronze, will also receive a publishing contract.

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It’s expensive to run a competition like this and to bring a book to market. We are a young press (est. in 2016), run by four women passionately committed to publishing the best in juvenile fiction. And, like most start-ups, we have a lot of heart and not much cash! Therefore, we are running a crowdfunding campaign featuring an exclusive hard cover edition of the 2019 Gold winner, Broken Shards of Time. It will have a white cloth cover with a blue foil imprint and a wrap cover designed by the teen author for maximum gorgeousness. The funds raised will go towards editorial costs, book design and typesetting, the initial print run, and publicity. Stretch goals have been set!

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Please join us by supporting The Uncommon Quest on Kickstarter!

It won’t be the same without you!

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CAMPAIGN FINISHES ON 30 SEPTEMBER 2019

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