Author Adam Cece and Huggabie Falls’ star, Cymphany, pose with just some of the many worldwide editions of Huggabie Falls.

My Text Prize Journey and Why EVERYONE Should Enter The Text Prize!

It was on the 10th April 2017 that I got both the best and worst email of my life, at the same time.

I had entered the Text Prize a few months before with my strange little book, which I though no one was ever going to want to publish, The Extremely Weird Thing That Happened in Huggabie Falls. This was a magically peculiar story, about the world’s weirdest town, which was a a crazy mix of David Walliams, Andy Griffiths, Enid Blyton and Lemony Snicket. It was a story I’d written 10 years before, and I’d written it just for me. It’s the sort of story every author has to write, the story that has more of themselves in it than any other, a story close to their heart, even though it may never be published.

I entered the Text Prize in a moment of don’t-think-about-it insanity, after my friend, Vikki Wakefield, a published (and amazing) author, told me to stop ummm-ing and err-ring and just submit “something”. During the conversation I thought, well I haven’t got anything ready to submit, and then later on I remembered my Huggabie Falls manuscript, which was sitting in my drawer and I hadn’t looked at it in almost ten years. Without even looking at it again I entered the comp and hit send. And then I promptly forgot about it.

Months later, on a Friday, I checked my emails, and for some unknown reason, on a whim, and even though I hadn’t done it in months, I checked my junk mail folder. I had an email in there from the day before, from Stefanie, an admin assistant at Text Publishing. She had emailed to request a time for a telephone meeting with Text Publishing’s senior publisher, Michael, and senior editor, Jane, and me on the following Monday.

I am often amazed by the serendipitous nature of this event. What if I had of missed this email thanks to the over-zealous Yahoo junk email filter? What if I didn’t happen to randomly check my junk email folder on that day? It doesn’t bear thinking about. And so began one of the most torturous weekends of my entire life. I knew that senior publishers and senior editors probably weren’t ringing every Text Prize entrant individually to say, bad luck you didn’t get shortlisted. I knew there was a high probability that this was something good, but I didn’t know what, or how good. Did I dare think that I had been shortlisted, or even won? Authors don’t often like to think this way, preferring to prepare themselves for rejection, and trying not to to get their hopes up, because ours is an industry with statistically more rejections than acceptances, so I tried (and failed) to keep my hopes from soaring. I think over that long (longest) weekend my wife and I played out every possible scenario over and over, good and bad. Or we thought we had played out every possible scenario. As it turned out, it was better than either of us had even imagined.

In my nervous sweaty phone call with Michael and Jane the following Monday, they told me that The Extremely Weird Thing That Happened in Huggabie Falls had caused quite a stir in the Text offices, as it had been passed around and every single staff member at Text Publishing had read and loved it. They’d had many high level entries, so they still hadn’t decided on the winner of the Text Prize yet, but regardless of the outcome of the competition they wanted to publish Huggabie Falls. Not only that but they wanted to know what ideas I had for future books in a Huggabie Falls series (this is a reminder to all authors to always have your ‘elevator pitches’ ready). The rest of the phone call was a blur, but somehow, by the end of it, inexplicably, I had a three book offer for the Huggabie Falls series, which included a huge, truly life-changing, cash advance.

I remember putting the phone down and just sitting there thinking did that really just happen? I don’t think I had breathed for the past ten minutes. I was In a daze, and I had to compose myself before I was able to ring my wife, who was at work, with a phone call that was so much better than she must have been expecting. As it turned out I did also win the Text Prize, my wife and I were flown to Melbourne, put up in a super fancy suite at a hotel, and I attended the Text Prize party and accepted the award. And as amazing as that night was, it was only just a taste of what was to come.

Over the next three years, the three books in the Huggabie Falls series were published. As if that wasn’t good enough by itself, not only was the Huggabie Falls series published in Australia and New Zealand, rights were sold and it was also published all over the world, in places like Spain, and Portugal, and Italy, and France, and the Netherlands, and the USA and the UK. I soon was filling up my book shelves (the author’s brag shelf) with all these international editions of the Huggabie Falls series, in all these languages, that I couldn’t read.

Over the next three years my life was crazy. I travelled all over the country, appearing at conferences and conventions and festivals and book launches, and literary lunches, and writers’ weeks, I spoke at hundreds of schools, I visited countless bookstores and libraries, and I got emails and letters from children all over the world—such as children in the Netherlands writing to me in Dutch because they were completing a school assignment about their favourite author—me! Or pictures of children in Spain reading my book in class, or an excited message from my friend in France having found my book in a bookstore just down the road from Notre Dame. I also got to meet a lot of my literary heroes, authors I love and admire, like Andy Griffiths, who wrote me this giant email telling me everything he loved about Huggabie Falls, and all the wish-I’d-thought-of-that moments he’d had while reading my book—and that email I now have framed and stuck on the wall above my desk. I appeared on podcasts, and radio and TV, had done photoshoots, and read reviews of my books online and in newspapers and magazines. I got to attend online and in person book clubs and got to see students make fan art, and plays and films out of my books, and saw students dressing up as my characters for Book Week. I had super cool book trailers made of my books, and had my books transformed into ridiculously cool audiobook productions, voiced by professional actors and featuring music and sound effects. I ran workshops and inspired budding authors, and I saw my picture on a screen thirty feet high, at a conference with thousands of students. And along the way I signed thousands and thousands of books and bookmarks and even balloons!

I look back now and all of this stemmed from a single moment, when I almost didn’t, but thankfully did, enter the Text Prize. I entered with a book I’d had sitting in my drawer for ten years, a book I was never sure if I would ever show to anyone. If the book had of stayed in that drawer it was never going to have a possibility of doing anything. None of this was ever going to happen. But after I entered that book in the Text Prize there was a possibility all this could happen, and that’s a chance worth taking. So what are you waiting for? Before you know it, next year you could be writing a post just like this one, encouraging other budding authors to enter the Text Prize and change their life forever!

You can find out more about the text prize here (https://www.textpublishing.com.au/text-prize).

The Huggabie Falls series, starting with The Extremely Weird Thing That Happened In Huggabie Falls, can be purchased worldwide, in many different languages, from bookstores or online retailers (https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-extremely-weird-thing-that-happened-in-huggabie-falls-adam-cece/book/9781925603484.html) or borrowed from libraries, or you can even purchase a (super cool) audiobook version (https://www.audible.com.au/series/Huggabie-Falls-Audiobooks/B07QFW4ZJF).