I Tested Book Award Pro So You Don’t Waste Money on Fake Book Awards

Looking for some credibility, visibility. Well, maybe it's time to submit your book to some book awards. But how do you know which ones are legit or how to submit a winning book award submission? Well, if you're wondering all about book awards, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, Founder of Book Launchers, creator of Author Launch Kit, and author of four books including the second edition of Self Publish and Succeed. And as I released the second edition, I thought. But this is a good reason to test some services and showcase some of our favorite partners, including one Book Award Pro. Book awards can be useful. A credible one can add third party validation, help with you getting media pitches, library, bookstore distribution, and of course give hesitant readers a reason to trust you. It also gives you something else to talk about and put on all of your author assets. But let's be honest, there's thousands of book awards and many exist primarily to collect entry fees, not not to elevate great books. So if an award doesn't have real judges, real standards and real visibility, it's not a credibility boost, it's just a gold sticker you get to buy. So the book award world can be a bit of a jungle and it can be really hard to know who to trust and what to do. But no matter what award you win, the award is so much what you, the author, make of it. All that said, and because of a lot of that, I love Book Award Pro for the fact they're vetting the awards so so you're not wasting money on awards with no credibility. They also make it really simple to see what's important to that award and if you even want to apply and then if you want to use their full service, they'll do the submission for you. So it's a lot of time and work saved. So let's see how this all works, shall we? To get started with Book Award Pro, you create an account. If you have a PDF of your book, it is really easy to get going. So much auto populates straight from the book upload. So this made it super easy to get going. There are a few areas where I have to add some content. Content like this author bio actually is old. I think it must be coming from an original Book Award account or maybe from Amazon. So I have to look at that. But I think it probably is from an original Book Award Pro account that we used years ago. I'm going to delete it and update it. There's also a section on inspiration for the book that I have to take A minute to write some information in here. Reviewing the keywords and categories for the awards. There are a few that I think I should focus on. There are places you could put the book, but there are some that are better than others. So I'm going to make some adjustments accordingly. Okay, once I've done that, I'm going to go ahead and click Submit and then pay. Now you can see the options for payment here. I don't want to do anything myself and because it is December when I'm filming this, and I don't want to put anything extra on my team because they've got a lot to do to get ready for the holiday shutdown, where we basically pack an entire month of work into three weeks so they can take a week between Christmas and New Year's off. So that means I can't add my book to their pile. Thankfully, there's options here for book awards to be full service. All right, so I'm going to choose the top plan and add them submitting for me for an additional $199. I don't need a bunch of awards, so let's just do one to test this out. Now they do Amazon reviews and editorial reviews. And my team has already done editorial reviews. But I can always use more Amazon reviews. But as I try to add three reviews or more and it adds the cost, you can see it does later flag it that I can't do the reviews. The book has to be priced at $2.99. So I'm going to have to come back and change the price and then do this. All right, so you can see how the pricing changes as you add more reviews. Now let's hit submit. And now you can see that the price has to be less than $5 and my book is $9.99. So later on I will drop it to 299 and come back and get three reviews from Amazon for this. All right, this is pretty darn cool how all of this works. So pretty quickly they show a list of awards and it shows you that it is submitting to this particular one. This list is actually largely awards that I'm familiar with and I agree with their selection. So that's pretty cool. And it looks like this one is already done. I would definitely submit to ibpa, but it doesn't have the button, so I'm not sure what that means. It could be expired or passed. But these other ones have the option to add them. So you could click for more details to decide if you want to pay more. For that submission they have URLs and more information along with fees. So let's say one of them looks pretty great and the due date is coming up. Well, you know they won't submit it because you only chose one a month. And in my case one and done is used, so. So if you know you want to submit to that one and you can see it's going to expire before your account renews, you can add it on, you can see the choice and you can self manage your submission or you can have them do it. Some awards are really easy to submit for you just pay the fee and submit the manuscript. But others do take more work. So I would potentially select the option for them to expertly submit and manage the submission process. Again, because it's not that much money to add it on and I don't want anything extra to do. But you could look to see what's involved before you decide. But I don't really, really need a bunch of awards. I've already won at least 22 awards for my books. It might be more, but I didn't do a great job of keeping records on them. So when you win awards, definitely keep a record of that anyway. I often say the reason I am able to produce such valuable videos for you all is because I'm really good at messing up and learning the hard way. So don't do things that I have done in the past. Avoid my mistakes. So definitely keep a record of the awards you win so you know how many awards and which awards you've won. All right, so now how do you know if it's worth investing more in a book award to get the submission in? Well, first, what's your plan to leverage a submission towards your goal? Well, first, know that book award pro has already done some vetting, so some of the cheesiest awards have been eliminated. What do I call cheese? Well, the awards that have a zillion categories, which means that more people are going to win and why they do that is because when you win they try to sell you a service package, awards or media package. And the business is not just in the fee, which a fee makes sense because it's work to manage and promote awards, but they are also profiting off the award winners, which I don't care for. As someone who has been a judge for a few awards, I can tell you the best ones only ask you to judge a few books. But some of them give you a lot of books, more than any one person could possibly actually read. And they just tell you to go through and rate them quickly. You have to just look at the COVID and read a couple pages and decide where it rates. That's not good. That's like factory. The good news is that there aren't that many true scams in the book award world, but many are very profit oriented over author success. Now one of my favorite personal companies is the Outstanding Creator Awards. I am a proud multi medal and trophy winner and what I love is they actually read the book. They send actual awards certificates and celebrate each and every winner. Cheer them on on their social media accounts and invite them back later for a battle of the winners. Amazing work. You can get some real leverage out of what they do for you. And if your book isn't good enough, they do give you feedback on how to improve it. Now how do you know which awards are worth it? Which ones you should avoid? Well again, Book Award Pro has already done some vetting, but you can go deeper. You can search for warnings or feedback or reviews from ChatGPT, Google or whatever your favorite search is. Ask if such and such award is a scam or search for complaints. Check Ally's Watchdog Rating. I'll put the list down below. If it's flagged as caution or avoid, skip it. Ally rates on transparency, fees and indie friendliness. Also look at past winners on the website and see if the list is long and mysterious. And you search some of the books and the reviews aren't good or the books in that category that you'd see your book in are not anything like your book or they aren't the quality of a winner in your mind. Move on. Finally, probe the website. Legit sites have clear eligibility rules, named judges which are usually authors, librarians, editors, people with bios and a history. And again, Book Award Pro has already done a lot of work to vet them, so this is just extra if you're using them. Of course, Ally's rated list is the gold standard. Greenlit awards will be on there and their guidebook is only $2.99. You can also check writers beware and of course IngramSpark's 2025 list has fresh indie focused contents and that contests and it's uploaded annually. All right, so how many awards should you try for? Well, you can see how this is a bit of an endless financial pit. So for most authors we'll submit them for a book award every quarter and because we're submitting them, they're not bearing any additional cost. It's in our fees and we might get them into three, maybe six in a year, you have a decent shot at winning one of those if your book is good and you got a well selected award. So submit to three or four and hopefully you're going to win one or two. Now sometimes with our authors, they don't know we have submitted to their book awards and one of our clients sent us this email that said, congratulations, your book title, your book, the title of the book has won a 2025 Best Indie Book award. You can expect your BIBA plaque to arrive by the end of December. Once you receive your plaque, please take a time to create and email us a photo of you holding your award. You can send it by simply replying to this email. Why send a photo? Blah, blah blah. Because they're going to promote it and carries on like that. Our client was worried that this was a scam, but in fact she won a very prestigious award and, and the plaque is gorgeous. Just check this out. But it was so sweet because she was like, is this legit or is this a scam? Well, it can be, but there was nobody asking her to buy the plaque or pay for anything. They were sending it to her, but we were the ones that submitted her book. And this has all the makings of a legitimate company because they didn't ask for anything but a photo. No money. The award is one of the best indie author awards you can get and a quick search will show you that. And they're sending actual things in the mail to her and they want a picture to promote it in the media. Now ultimately it's up to you how many book awards, if any, you submit to. A book award does give you some added credibility if it is a good one. And how many to submit to. Well, you can keep submitting for quite a while, so you can wait to see the results. But again, this one I've submitted for it doesn't judge until March or April, so deciding how many, I would say submit to a few so you have a chance at winning at least one of them. Now, besides having the cost of submitting to a bunch of awards and how quickly that adds up, really, you're not going to get ROI from winning a ton of awards. You really just need one or two and then leverage them. The award itself is not a magic button that leads to fame and sales. So what do you need to do with it? When I say leverage it and use it, well, put it on your cover if you can. Put it on your sales page, add the exact award logo and text onto your ebook or your cover. So what do you do with the award? Put it on your cover? Sometimes they have a specific image you can use or certain text Update your Amazon KDP IngramSpark Change your book description headline to highlight the win. Add the medal to your website hero image, email signature. These are all great steps, especially with the high quality, well respected awards. Then spread the winning word on social media to your audience. Celebrate with them. Continue to leverage it for library bookstore media attention. So make sure your sales sheet and your media kit are updated. Draft a media release with the news and of course use it in that retail and library push. You can contact your local bookstore within 100 miles and say I'm a local award winning author. Would you consider stocking a few copies on consignment or even get them to order it? If you're using IngramSpark, you can also upgrade your IngramSpark title metadata to include the award. While they don't do it every day, librarians do sometimes search for award winning indie titles and now you can legitimately add award winning author to your bio. Create an awards page on your website with logos and links as well and use this win as social proof for future ads. Facebook, Amazon, all of those things can help you convert two times better. Even pitch yourself for panels, conventions, speaking gigs. And of course make sure you're mentioning that you are an award winning author. Now how do you leverage awards? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And now you might be wondering what the results of my award submissions are. Well, the awards that will be submitted right now will not be judged for months and months, so you're just going to have to subscribe after you like the video and have commented on what you do with awards down below and watch for the update video with the results.