Dear O'Abby: Should I mention this in my query?

 Dear O'Abby,

I recently won a local competition for unpublished romance novels.  It's not a huge prize - just a few hundred dollars - but there were over 400 books submitted to the contest, so I'm pretty proud that my book was judged the best out of such a large pool.

Now that the excitement of the contest has died down, I'm about to start querying my book to agents and am wondering if I should mention my contest win in the query.  I know it's not like winning a Pulitzer, but isn't it proof that my book is at least a little bit better than other books in my genre?

Any advice would be gratefully accepted.

Best,

Winner Winner

Dear Winner Winner,

Congratulations on your win.  That is exciting and certainly worth celebrating.

There is certainly no harm in mentioning a contest win in your query, but don't expect it to be the most compelling thing for an agent or publisher.  There are thousands of writing contests out there, and few of them are important or prestigious enough to make your submission a must-read.  You still need to write a great query, and I would save this competition news until the very end of the letter rather than leading with it.

For the most part, agents aren't going to care much about contest wins, but if the judges are noteworthy or it's sponsored by a significant writing related organisation, the win might have more weight.  It also might not.  I was a semi-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award back when that was a thing, and mentioning that in my query didn't do anything to improve my acceptance rate.

So at the end of the day, it won't hurt to mention your win.  It just may not make a lick of difference to you time in the query trenches.

Hope that's helpful and good luck with the querying.

X O'Abby