When Erica Eisdorfer submitted her unpublished novel to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, she was realistic, to say the least, about her chances.

Hers was among some 5,000 entries in the competition, after all -- an enormous submission pool that proves, she said, that "Everyone you see has a novel under their bed."

"When I entered, I said, 'Nah, I have no chance,'" said Eisdorfer, who lives in Carrboro and manages the Bull's Head bookstore on the UNC campus. "But when they cut it down to the top 800 and I was still in it, I went, 'You know, I really want to make the top one hundred.' And when I made the top hundred, I was like, 'I'll die if I don't make the top ten.'"

Eisdorfer is still with us -- and, yes, that means she's made the top 10.

Her novel, "The Wet Nurse's Tale," is one of the 10 finalists in the national contest sponsored by Amazon.com, Penguin Group and HP.

The winner, to be announced on April 7, will receive a publishing contract from Penguin Group, which includes a $25,000 advance, and an entertainment technology package.

Up to this point, the competition, billed as "a contest in search of the next popular novel," has been decided by panels of expert readers: Amazon.com Top Reviewers, Publishers Weekly staff and editors from Penguin Group.

The reading public will make the ultimate call, though. People can go online at www.amazon.

com/abna to read excerpts from the finalists' submissions, along with the reviews and rankings they received during previous rounds, and vote for the winner.

That's the part of the process that makes Eisdorfer a bit uneasy.

"This is the American Idol part of the competition," she said. "You're basically supposed to troll for votes, and I'm sort of shy about doing that."

A colleague at UNC told Eisdorfer about the contest just about one week before the submission deadline. As it happened, she had a novel on hand, one she wrote two years ago and had been trying, without success, to find an agent for. She reformatted it to meet the contest's requirements and sent it in.

"The Wet Nurse's Tale" is actually the fourth novel Eisdorfer has completed, but it's the first she felt she had a reasonable chance of seeing in print. Publishers Weekly called it "a gem of a novel."

"I have this theory that people have to write a not-so-great autobiographical novel before they can go on to write anything eelse," she said. "I mean, occasionally one of those becomes a classic, but that's rare. Most people have to write that first autobiographical one and get it out of their system. It took me two. Then I wrote a young adult novel and now I have this one.

"With this one, because it's not autobiographical, I really felt like I'd created something new."

The book, she said, is exactly what its title implies. It's the tale, told in her own words, of a wet nurse named Susan Rose, who breast-feeds and cares for the infants of the wealthy in mid-19th century England.

"She's a big, tall, overly plump and rather coarse person," Eisdorfer said. "But she's very smart and funny, and she has a lot of street smarts. She's more than a little unreliable. I wanted the reader to be on her side but also be a little shocked by her."

Eisdorfer, an acknowledged anglophile, has a fondness for novels that are imbued with what she called "the foggy English damp" and the books of writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens; indeed, she and a friend recently took turns reading Dickens' "Great Expectations" aloud to their children. Yet in her 20-plus years as a book-buyer for the Bull's Head, she said she's never come across a novel written from the point of view of a wet nurse. Her experience nursing her own children piqued her curiosity about the ancient profession.

"I imagine a lot of women wonder what it must be like to nurse children who are not their own," she said. "When you do something for money there has to be some level of detachment, but, still there is a bond there. Being a wet nurse, that has to right there next to the world's oldest profession; it was standard work for women for centuries, millennia maybe."

Until early this week, the votes and reviews were available to watch online. But Amazon, in the interests of keeping the outcome in doubt until the winner is announced, has now hidden the vote tally. Voting will continue through March 31.

Eisdorfer said she's glad the vote totals have been taken out of view; she'd been checking, she said, "about a zillion time a day." At last count, she said, she wasn't up at the top of the ten -- but she wasn't too worried about that, because even if she doesn't win she's already gotten what she wanted in the first place.

"After my manuscript made it to the round of 1,000, I did get an agent, and I got calls from two more," she said. "So whatever happens with the contest, it already feels like a win to me. It's a dream come true already."