Blogger-Given Awards Are Here to Stay (On the Indie Lit Awards)

In the fall of 2010, I started wondering why there weren’t more awards (for books) given by bloggers. There are Christian Fiction awards and Children’s book awards given, but no others (that I could find).  In an age where book blogging has gained momentum as the marketing tool of choice for publicists, why so few awards given by the very people who love books so much they write about them… often for free?! So, I thought about it, asked a few of my blogging friends if they’d be on board to be judges, and off we went. It was hard to choose a name. I had no idea where these awards would be five years from then; would they be solely blogger given awards? Would we incorporate regular readers as well? Therefore I didn’t want to include “blogger” or “people’s choice” in the name. Instead, I chose Independent Literary Awards – thinking it would be clear that the awards were given by an independent group of people (not paid by the publishing industry) to literary works. I had not thought of the fact that people would then associate us with indie presses and indie bookstores (with which we are not in association with, though we do, of course, accept nominations by indie publishers) — ahhh, hindsight how we love thee.

The first year we opened nominations to bloggers only, and created teams of judges filled with bloggers. This time, we opened the nominations to all readers, but kept the judging panels filled with only bloggers. We have just announced our Short Lists (which are stated below) and the judges are in the process of reading and discussing the books. In mid-March, we will announce the winners in all seven genres – and if we’re as lucky as we were last year, we’ll publish interviews with the winning authors.

What have I learned through the process of running these awards? Writers are truly cognizant of what bloggers do to help them achieve success. For the most part, they are excited about the awards and thankful to be acknowledged by readers. Out of all of the authors who’ve made it to the Short Lists in these two years, there have been only a couple who have not responded to us in any way (I could tell you who, but I won’t… you could probably guess by yourself). Even other prize winners (Pulitzer prize winner included) have e-mailed me exclaiming how honored they are to be chosen by the people who trek to the bookstore to buy their books, or choose them to feature on their blogs, or make them into their book club’s pick for discussion. The writers who write for readers are truly grateful, and the ones who write for themselves (or the paycheck) — they’ll get their accolades with or without us; we aren’t holding our breath for the excited e-mail. We do hope you’ll follow along and check out some of the titles below for yourself. And we hope that you’re starting to keep track of  your reading for this year (works published in 2012), because they will be eligible for nomination once we open back up in the fall/ winter of 2012.