And The Winner Is ... The Website Owners.

​Is it worth Indie authors entering book award contests?
 
If I tell you that none of the book marketing gurus suggest it as a way of marketing books, then you can probably guess the answer.
 
If book awards/contests sold books, then the marketing gurus would be all over them.
 
The biggest awards, eg The Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize, sell a lot of books but we’re talking about Indie authors here and none of us are going to get close to a nomination for those levels of awards! But even those levels of awards don’t sell more books for many of their nominees. We can probably all name a Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize winner, but how many people can name the runners up? Even fewer people can name any nominees?
 
At the most basic level, book contests appeal to the vanity of authors. They say “you know your book is good, so why not come and claim your prize, because winning is a foregone conclusion.”
 
Well, get over yourself. It is readers who decide if a book is any good, not authors.

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But I guess all Indies feel tempted to enter book contests from time to time, on the basis that being able to claim that your book is a prize winner will sell you more books.
 
However, sales data doesn’t back that up.
 
Data suggests that being able to put “Winner of the (whatever) Book Award” in your book blurb has very little impact on sales. Being able to put a good quote from a reader’s review in the blurb is far more effective.,
 
OK. Maybe winning an award might sell you a few more copies, but what are your chances of winning?
 
The websites that run these awards are businesses and they make money from them, so they want as many entrants as possible. Entry fees can range from as low as $20 (£18 approx) up to several hundred dollars. So, it can be a big money earner for the websites.
 
Let’s say that they manage to attract 1,000 entries. The only books that the readers may be interested in are the winners – or at least the top three. So, you have something like a 999 to one chance of your book winning.

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I wouldn’t back a horse at those odds – would you?
 
All the other entrants remain unknown to readers, even if they get a place on the website. They just get lost amongst the other 1,000 entrants that the website attracted to enter the contest.
 
OK, some contests award prizes for the best books in a range of genres. This makes it more likely that an author can win a prize, especially in a niche genre.
 
There are generally recognised to be around 50 genres* (publishers disagree on how many exactly). If you rule out non-fiction, the number of genres shrinks considerably to around 30.
 
But let’s stick with 50. So, 50 winners, and another 100 in second and third places. Add in the overall winners and runners up and that gives you 153 prize winners.
 
But that still leaves 847 entrants without anything to say on their blurb despite having paid their entry fee.
 
And a lot of book contests are considerably bigger than 1,000 entrants, so the probability of winning a prize gets even more remote.

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There are book “contests” which, if you pay a large enough entry fee, you are guaranteed to win a prize. You are buying the prize, not winning it.

But readers generally aren’t fooled by those. If they haven’t heard of the prize, they won’t be suckered in by a fake like that.
 
OK, at the end of the day it’s your money. If you want to spend it on entry fees for a book awards, real or phoney, that’s your business.
 
But in terms of increasing sales, you would be better off putting that money towards an advertising campaign. The probability of increasing sales is considerably higher.
 
* Genres are different from book categories. Amazon has thousands of book categories which are created by slicing and dicing the main genres until they are so niche that some have hardly any books in them.. Genres can often be subdivided, eg Fantasy alone subdivides into a dozen different sub-genres, but the overall genre is still fantasy and that is the level at which book contests award prizes. After all, they want to hang onto the entry fees, not pay them out by awarding lots of prizes.
 
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