A UK event and book fair celebrating independent authors of all genres. Next event: Saturday April 26th 2014 at the MadLab Manchester.
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The Wishing Shelf Book Awards boasts 100% satisfaction from every publisher and author who has, so far, entered (42 in the first year, 104 in the second) . The problem with other awards is, if you win, you win. Fantastic! But if you don't, you get nothing. With our award, every entrant, finalist or not, gets all the feedback from the judging, a catchy quote for the back of their next book or reprint and a review on Amazon and Goodreads. Then, if you are a finalist, you also get a logo, a certificate, marketing on the web and their book in The School Librarian. This year, we even organised for the all finalists in the children's category to have their book reviewed by The School Librarian. The authors were very happy.With so many awards right now, particularly for self-published authors, the author is simply a '$' or a '£' sign. Even if they win, by then the organisers are concentrating on getting next year's authors to enter. But we answer every email personally and we ask authors to send us the blurb of their book prior to entering; if we think it's not the sort of thing our readers will enjoy, we urge them not to enter (we turn away approx. 10% at the moment; I often read the first chapter on Amazon (Look Inside) and if it's full of errors and needs a good edit, I tell the author not to bother). There is even a Facebook page so the authors can make suggestions on how to improve the awards and how to best spend the entry fees to best market their books.
