My good friend and coworker Alan Averill (http://www.alanaverill.com) -- whose work many of you have likely already read whether you realized it or not (he was the main writer on Hotel Dusk, Nier, Tales of Graces f, and several others; he also worked on the two DS Advance Wars games, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, etc.) -- self-published a novel last year called The Beautiful Land that is now up for a major award on Amazon (the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award). The winner is determined by votes, and voting ends in 48 hours. If he wins, he'll get a publishing deal with Penguin (!!!).

He's up against two other dudes for the award. Selfishly, I want him to win because he's a good friend of mine (who does a lot of work for 8-4) and I think he deserves it -- but on a grander scale, I want him to win because he's a game writer, and good game writers are HARD TO FIND. The community here at GAF is by far the best and most influential in the gaming world (2ch can suck it), and I think with our support, we can help him get this victory and get his book published.

Anyway, it takes 30 seconds to vote -- if you've ever enjoyed any of the above games, or just want to do your part to help a gaming dude achieve his dreams, all you gotta do is head here and drop your vote for him in the General Fiction category:

http://www.amazon.com/b?node=332264011

Voting ends in less than 48 hours, BTW. Any help is appreciated!

Thanks for being awesome, GAF ( ´ ▽ ` )ノ

Arghhh... you need a Amazon.com account to vote.

I don't know if this helps or not, but when I ordered from Amazon's UK branch my login stuff carried over. With total irony, that UK order was for Another Code: R, another CiNG title.