All last week and this week we’ve been discussing marketing methods to get featured in the “Blog” category of the Outskirts Press app. We have established that the best way is to focus on being featured in one of these blog categories from our Outskirts Press blog:
Author Spotlights
Book Spotlights
Monthly Bestsellers
Virtual Book Tours
Award Winners
Book Fair Participants
So far we have already discussed Author and Book Spotlights, bestsellers, and Virtual Book Tours. Now we’re going to talk about winning a book award.
Winning a book award is kind of like getting on a “bestseller” list. There are so many “book awards” and so many “bestseller lists” that the sheer number of them have watered down their prestige and value. It may be true that appearing on the New York Times bestseller list is just a wee bit more impressive than appearing on the Outskirts Press bestseller list. No doubt. And it may be true that winning “Gold” in the Reader’s Choice awards is less impressive than winning the Nobel Prize in literature. No argument.
But do you know what is even less impressive than winning a “Gold” in the Reader’s Choice awards?
Not winning one.
Nothing against the Reader’s Choice awards, or the Writer’s Circle Awards, or the Ben Franklin Awards, or the Indie Awards, or the Best Book Awards, or the CIPA Awards, or the IPPY Awards, or the….. I could go on and on. All these awards have merit and value because there are WAY more people who do not win any book awards than people who do. And once you accomplish something that only the minority accomplish, it’s worth bragging about. Isn’t that one of the cool things about publishing a book?
We think so, and that’s why we feature many of our award-winning authors both on our blog and in our iPhone app. We love bragging about our authors’ successes. We realize we’re never going to publish a Nobel Prize winner. And that’s okay. But we do publish statistically more award-winning books than any other self-publishing firm, and as a self-publishing firm, that’s worth bragging about, too.
So, that’s another way to get featured in our iPhone app: Win a book award. We make it easy for our authors to enter six vetted awards all at once with our Book Award Submissions package, but, as I mentioned above, there are literally hundreds of awards to pursue independently.
Speaking of which, we have our own book award (why wouldn’t we?) and authors who publish with Outskirts Press can be automatically eligible for the $1,500 grand prize, just like our 2010 Best Book of the Year award-winner Doris Kenney Marcotte. For details about the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award, click here.
President of Outskirts Press 