Book award shows abound in the publishing world, and every year in the fall you can expect to see lots of email, flyers, mailings and solicitations to enter your books into one contest or another.
This subject needs a fuller examination, and I’m busy putting together for you a big list of indie book awards that I should have ready next week.
The thing with contests is you have to know why you’re entering them.
- Some of these book competitions are prestigious, and it’s a real boost to win a prize. Winning an award can make a big difference to your book marketing, because you’ll feel more energized and have something to talk about, write press releases about, and link to. That’s all good.
- Some of them only sound prestigious, and are nothing more than another way to make money from authors. Fees for these contests can run very high, and then the category possibilities kick in. You might think you can multiply your chances to win by entering in multiple categories, but you’ll also be multiplying your entry fee, which can quickly run into hundreds of dollars.
- And some “contests” are contests in name only. What I mean is that most every book that enters will win something, and you can then announce the fact you won on your book cover or in your promotion.
But What About e-Books?
I’ve been thinking for a while about the problem with e-book covers. The problem is not enough people are paying attention to them. Almost every e-book cover you see in the Kindle store is a mini version of the print book cover. That’s just not good enough.
It’s up to us to come up with ways to positively influence how that revolution will turn out.
Especially when you realize e-books aren’t really books in the traditional sense. We are at the beginning of a revolution, and it’s up to us to come up with ways to positively influence how that revolution will turn out.
And I’ve even had readers suggest the same thing.
So here’s what I’m thinking, and where I could use your feedback.
I’d like to start a regular feature on e-book covers to highlight the really good ones and look for examples that are clearly setting a new standard for this new type of text.
It seems like we could do this monthly without a problem, with a culminating annual award(s).
It also seems like it would work best if readers would help supply the entries. It doesn’t matter where they come from, but readers here surf many of the book sites online, and certainly see lots of great covers I don’t get to.
How about helping out by crowdsourcing the entries in this attempt to raise the bar for the covers that will define the new life of the book?
If you’ll send in the entries, I’ll take care of the rest. We can set up a few categories and a place to submit them. I think it would be really helpful for lots of authors to be able to see what other indie publishers are doing with their e-book covers.
If you’re in, I’m in. Let me know what you think.
Are the different Genres getting too set in their ways? Advice to Indie authors is to look at the common ‘style’ that books of their genre and ensure that their cover falls within those parameters. So customer recognition and marketing is one side of the coin. And I guess the advice is sound in the competitive arena of selling your book. But surely this is now stifling creativity when so many book covers are just “me too”. My comments are mainly aimed at ebook fiction, but probably apply a little wider. As an aspiring author I now have the dilemma of whether to follow the crowd, or get my designer to actually be creative.