After decades as a publishing industry insider and entrepreneur, I founded Book Award Mastery to help thousands of fiction and nonfiction authors identify, choose, plan and apply for the right awards for their specific book from the 10,000+ given annually to English-language books, whether they worked with a publisher or self-published. And also to maximize their return on investment from their book and any awards they win.

If you are looking to research, plan and apply for the right awards for your book that is being planned or is currently underway, recently finished or published long ago, we pride ourselves on being the best service anywhere!

Among the many roles I’ve had in the book world, I’m a former McGraw-Hill top executive, was a book awards judge at a popular awarding program, founded Executive Authors two decades ago to help business-building authors and aspiring industry leaders create great success via writing a book (this included helping them find the right and wrong book awards) plus created the system that led to my winning 75% of the book awards I’ve pursued for some of the 42 nonfiction books I’ve written and built my businesses around. I also help high-profile national and international organizations to create their own book awards program and am writing a book about 200 ways real-world winners have gotten tangible ROI results from their wins.

By inviting authors everywhere to use my system to research, decide, plan and apply for the right quality awards for them and their book – from our database of 10,000+ – I’m thrilled to help every one of them pursue success and recognition through book awards as well as learn how to make the most of their book and any awards wins!

To get a feel for my point of view, expertise and insights informed by my 50 years since entering the book industry, cruise through these snippets from recent speeches to authors and industry insiders:

** Book awards never became so hugely popular when bestseller status did – largely, I believe, because of the cumbersome research required to find the right and wrong awards for each author and book combination. We hope to open those floodgates of interest (and of big opportunity for authors!), now that we’ve eliminated that research burden.

** Another ginormous opportunity for authors is the 2,000+ quality awards given yearly (and in our database) that have no publication date restrictions . . . this means long-ago-published – and self-published – books have equal chances to win as current ones (as long as their content isn’t outdated) . . . best of all, this enables many more than the 3+ million new titles added to Amazon each year to qualify for awards (i.e., a great many of the older 20 million sold in Amazon’s U.S. store qualify, too!).

** Of the 450+ awarding programs we’ve vetted, we consider 120 to be unsuitable and 143 as the Best of the Rest. Those 143 are structured to collectively give over 12,000 awards annually, but we see (and keep track of) many hundreds that go unawarded due to lack of quality submissions.

** Our service is about the quality – not quantity – of awards options . . . plus our professional assessment of your best chances of winning based on multiple factors.

** It’s confounding to us that no other awards experts talk about the importance of #1 author goals. For us, that singular purpose and motivation behind authors’ impetus to pursue awards is never out of sight, never out of mind, never overlooked or forgotten. It drives everything we do.

** Be cautious about applying for awards on googled “Best Awards” lists . . . so many authors apply for them due to Google’s broad reach that your chance of winning is minuscule (often less than 1%) compared to chances that are 10, 20 or more times higher at other quality awarding programs.

** Applying for awards is as simple as any online shopping purchase, after you’ve researched and decided what you want to apply for. It’s not like applying for college, with required cover letters and essay answers. I’d be surprised if it took you more than 10 minutes to complete each submission.

** An award without a multi-strategy, multi-year action plan is as useless as a book is without one . . . and our authors begin creating their plan for both.

** Quite simply, book awards change authors’ lives – the very trajectory of their lives, as authors who win – or who merely pursue awards, before any wins – start seeing themselves in new ways . . . as a potential winner and leader with few peers, which fundamentally changes them. They think bigger and bolder, have expanded horizons and seek a higher level of success in all areas of life . . . I’ve seen it happen SO many times – whether fiction or nonfiction, 1st book or 15th. Don’t just believe me – ask any awards winner (and prepare to hear an amazing story).

** You’ll soon be able to learn hundreds of high-value ways to monetize awards wins through my coming book about how real-world winners benefited from important new relationships with some of the thousands of potential collaborators, readers, media and other influencers, podcast hosts, event planners, industry insiders, etc. who specifically seek award winners to invite into their world. (Very often, non-winners don’t have access to these, no matter how hard they try.)

** I’m consulting to a new wave of high-profile awarding programs – professional associations and certification bodies whose emerging programs will recognize a new type of book and author excellence . . . the thought leadership and cutting-edge new thinking of the industry expertise in submitted books.

** Big, big changes are afoot in the industry . . . AI-assisted judging, massive increases in the number of authors pursuing awards and of awarding organizations, ever-more extensive – and creative – winner benefits as those organizations vigorously compete for authors . . . responses to the inevitable, far-reaching coming changes at Amazon as AI enables unlimited, fast and free delivery of stories/books/entire series that are fully customized to every reader’s character profile, storyline and writing style preferences – plus instant, also-free, 1- or 2-page summaries of every nonfiction book on the planet . . . to name just a few.