Julie Broad walks nonfiction authors through four tests to decide if a book award is worth the entry fee. Check if judges are real people, do the math on competition odds, compare promised deliverables to what winners actually get, and verify whether industry gatekeepers actually care by looking at past winners' own promotion of the award.
Chapters
There are so many book awards. Whew. So if you're a nonfiction author, a speaker, a consultant, and you're sitting there with a list of book awards trying to figure out how to tell if a book award is a good book award, this video is for you. Every book award open to self-published nonfiction authors charges you to enter, including the good ones. Here's how I look at this. A book award isn't necessarily an honor. It's more like buying media. There's definitely things that make an award better than another, and I'll cover that now. Is there a judge? Can you name a human being who's going to read your book? The next test that I like to do is what I would call the math test. How many categories? How many entries? And how many winners? When you win, what do you actually get? And what do you actually have to buy? They tell you, woo, you win a press release, a listing on their website, a digital seal. Well, these cost the organizers nothing and give you no value. The next test is the gatekeeper. This is the one that decides whether the award does anything for your business. The judges and gatekeepers are the same people, and that is what a real award is. It is a group of gatekeepers publicly telling other gatekeepers that your book is worth their shelf space. But I want to highlight it. Check past winners, not the award's own testimonial page, but go to the actual authors. See if they are featuring their awards. So is there such a thing as a good book award? Yeah, a good book award is where you can name the judges, count the number of competitors you had, and point at a real person who cares that you won.
