Canada launches self-published book awards

Self-published authors are finding themselves at the centre of even more celebration this week as the Association for Art and Social Change in Canada announced its plans to launch a new book awards forum especially for self-published authors.

The Association is the producer of Toronto’s INSPIRE! International Book Fair and it has told the Canadian press that it wants to recognise achievement in writing, design and the overall marketability of self-published books and their authors. The Creation of Stories: Canada’s Self-Publishing Awards will first take place at this year’s Inspire! Book Fair, and are open to all Canadian self-published authors.

The only criteria to fill include stipulations that the book must have been written and published by a Canadian, and it must have been produced between July 1^st 2013 and September 1^st 2014. The awards will offer prizes in three different categories, including books for children, books for young adult audiences and books for adults. The winners of each category will not only receive a $3,000 cash prize but also several other prizes which will help them to further the success of their books.

The winners of The Creation of Stories will each receive up to 100 copies of their books printed and bound, as well as a professional marketing consultation and marketing campaign provided by indie publishing platform Blurb, the sponsors of the awards, and a trip to the Inspire! International Book Fair.

The Association for Art and Social Change will provide a committee to judge the first round of self-published books, creating a shortlist of six finalists in every category which will then be judged individually by a panel of industry professionals. While this panel has not yet been determined, the judging criteria will include excellent in approach as well as creative use of images and language.

The book’s ability to appeal to a large audience will also play a large factor in the judging, and Jason Lilien, the director of marketing at Blurb has said that while many might argue that the writing should be at the core of any panel judging books, the writing component is still a very large part of the criteria. “At the heart of this is creating great stories,” he told the Canadian press as the awards were announced in July, continuing to say that each finalist in the shortlist would be automatically entered into the People’s Choice Award worth $1,000 which will be decided by public voting.

According to Blurb Inc., Canada is the second largest self-publishing market, and the largest outside of the United States. While there are many other self-publishing producers out there, Blurb has more than 250,000 registered users in Canada, and has produced millions of titles across North America since it began in 2005.

The Inspire! Toronto International Book Fair will be held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre between November 14^th and 16^th 2014. As well as revealing the results of The Creation of Stories awards, the event will showcase a huge range of books from self-published to multinational published, children’s literature to business.

 

Self-publishing was popular way before we started!

The self-publishing industry is becoming one of the fasting growing industries around at the moment, and as more and more people jump on the bandwagon, just whose idea was it to forego the traditional publishers and do it all for ourselves?

If you look into the past at one of the world’ most famous literature writers, you might be able to imagine that it was Virginia Woolf who brought us the possibility of publishing our own books. Virginia Woolf is by far one of the most well regarded women writers in history, but many might be surprised to know that the majority of her work was published herself.

While her first novel The Voyage Out was published by her half-brother’s publishing house Duckworth Press in 1915, Woolf then went on to create her very own publishing press in order to escape the constraints that traditional publishers forced on her. Together with her husband, Leonard Woolf, Virginia created Hogarth Press so that she could from then on avoid any creative restrictions in terms of writing as well as publish books that most commercial publishers at that time would have turned down.

The Woolf’s also decided that they wanted to make book covers beautiful. While the couple were hardly struggling for money, creating their own press was a brave move and it allowed liberation in the publishing field. Virginia went on to write essays, short stories and novels that were published through Hogarth Press as well as hand publishing those from other more creative authors who wanted to escape the typical constraints.

The couple would bind books with patterned paper that they spent time and effort seeking out, such as Japanese print, patterned paper from Czechoslovakia and other cheerful designs. It was this couple that make books what they are to look at today, and it is also perhaps this couple that enabled self-publishing to be the industry that it is today.

If anybody ever tells you that real writers use a traditional publisher, just remember that Virginia Woolf could not be regarded as anything but a real writer, and it was she who first broke away from the rigorous demands of traditional publishing in order to writer and publish her own work in her own way. Real writers self-publish too, and they’re good at it!