Tip 25—Apply for Book Awards: 30-Day Book Marketing Challenge

Описание: Today’s tip number is to apply for book awards. I think that this is one of those underrated marketing tactics that a lot of people just don't even think about.

When we apply for book awards, it does the same thing as PR. If you are accepted for a book award, the public relations opportunities are almost endless because you can take the emblem, or what the award itself looks like, and you can put that on your website. You can add it into your email signature. You can put out your own press release. And I know when I even say the word press release, you're probably rolling your eyes thinking: who does press releases anymore? And I agree with that sentiment. However, press releases are good for bringing traffic to your website. I'm not saying that if you put out a press release, you're going to get business from it, but there's definitely a kind of rising tide that floats all boats in terms of just the SEO (search engine optimization) component of putting out a press release.

And so getting a book award is a legitimate, good reason to put out some content around it. And it doesn't have to be a press release. It could be that you do some video like this, where you just hop on and say, “Oh my God, I'm so excited that my book was just accepted for the XYZ award.” Because what that does is it is validating your work. Book awards are not something that you can just submit for and get.

That's something to be really mindful of, book awards are very, very competitive. And there's a lot of different governing bodies that you can submit your book to. There are some governing bodies where a hundred thousand books are submitted to them, so the chances of yours getting accepted are a very low percentage. But then there are some super small nonprofits that also give out awards The key is just finding the book awards that are applicable to what you're writing about.

Additionally, you can kind of look at what your competition has done and see what organizations they have been recognized by or what they have been awarded. If you’re interested, go down that rabbit hole and try to find who that organization is, what their standards are, et cetera for submitting.

The one thing to pay very close attention to are the submission details. When it comes to book awards, there are time limits in which you have to submit your book for an award. And oftentimes doing a second edition does not count. Typically books have to have been released within like the last 12 months. Sometimes I've seen them extend to the last two years, but usually beyond that they are not going to be accepted. However, take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. This is just based on what I have seen in my experience.

I would look because there are book awards for content. There are book awards for design. There are book awards for the category. There's a million different ways that you can slice this. So I just recommend just keeping an eye out. You might even want to set a Google alert, if you can find an award that you think would make sense for you. Because what this does is that you're then able to say, “I am an award winning author.” And that carries a lot of weight for your potential readers. It can be more important in different genres than others. But generally speaking, just being able to say that you're an award winning while someone else next to you might not be able to say that, that's a pretty big deal.

I am going to put a link to a list of awards I know of on the publishyourpurposepress.com/marketing website. At PYP, we keep track of awards because as a publisher, different governing bodies will send us details saying like, “Hey, do you have any authors that should submit for this award?” And then we compile that into a spreadsheet. I will tell you right is not a complete list in any way, shape or form. It's probably made up of maybe a dozen when there's hundreds of them out there.

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Our mission at Publish Your Purpose Press (PYP) is to discover and publish authors who are striving to make a difference in the world. We give underrepresented voices power and a stage to share their stories, speak their truth, and impact their communities.