When it comes to awards, our authors are already pretty prolific. From the Benjamin Franklin Awards to ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards and the Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Book Awards, Outskirts Press is often represented with talented winners and finalists. Since we understand the value of our authors being recognized by these contests, we do our best to encourage them to submit their book(s) for as many awards as they can. Winning an award or being recognized as a finalist is a great reason to send out another press release, initiate another PR Publicist Campaign, create another book video and upload it to YouTube, etc. In fact, being a finalist or winner in a book contest can breathe new life into all book marketing efforts. And it should. Depending upon which source you believe, there are upwards of 500,000 books published every year in America. A statistical handful win awards. That’s the true quality gatekeeper; not the publisher and not the reader.
Our close relationship with the Colorado Independent Publishers Association also means that many of our authors are familiar with the CIPA EVVY Book Awards, which recognizes excellence in independently published books. Each year we officially nominate approximately 5% of our published titles for submission to the EVVY Book Awards. To help us narrow down the manuscripts, only books published with the Diamond and full-color Pearl packages are considered for nomination. It’s also an unwritten rule — there, I just wrote it — that the books should feature a custom cover design and be professionally edited. After all, we want our official EVVY nominated books to shine, and shine they do: Since beginning our participation in the EVVY Awards, Outskirts Press has been the winningest publisher each year among all participating publishers. Each year we win approximately 10-15 EVVY Awards.
So, in other words, we already have an established method for determining the top 1% of the books we publish each year at Outskirts Press — our EVVY Award winners. The Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year Award goes a few steps further. From among all the EVVY-winning books Outskirts Press will select three finalists, in much the same manner we determined the winner of our December Best Book Promotion, Irv Sternberg and his book The Persian Project.
From among those finalists, a winner is determined. How? That’s the next blog topic…
President of Outskirts Press 