I won a prize

... but it wasn't a winner

Julia, the acquisitions editor at Sibylline Press, emailed to tell me that PROMISE IN THE DESERT had won first place in the category of “regional lit” in a literary competition that she’d entered for me. She sent congratulations and offered to create a graphic for me to post online. I said “wow,” flushed with pride. Then I looked it up.

Turns out, the Great Southwest Book Festival is one of a score of regional festivals with enticing names—New York Book Festival, Hollywood Book Festival, Paris Book Festival, and so on—run by J M Northern Media. None of these festivals, I discovered, is actually a gathering of writers and readers, like the marvelous festival organized by volunteers in Tucson every spring. (Every March, 120,000+ people gather on the University of Arizona campus to discuss the year’s new books and celebrate the literary enterprise.)

Northern does not behave like a typical festival organizer. Each year, the company aggressively solicits paid entries from self-published authors and small presses in multiple categories for a given competition. Claiming to use an anonymous panel of judges, Northern promises to give one “grand prize winner” a plane ticket and a small sum of money to be presented at an in-house ceremony. That’s it, no gathering, no community celebration of storytelling. Victoria Strauss, writing for the blog “Writer Beware,” estimated that Northern earns well over $1million/year: 15 festivals x 15 entry categories x $50 per entry plus sale of related goods, thus profiteering from indie authors’ desire for recognition. (Northern’s other product line is teaching indie film makers and musicians how to hold their own film festivals and book their own tours. More exploitation of the vulnerable.)

I asked Julia if she knew Northern’s reputation. She said “yes, but don’t fret, bottom line is you can now call yourself an ‘award winning author’.” Julia is both a terrific writer and a savvy marketer, and she managed to capitalize on the Northern grand prize she won a few years ago. But I’m not going to ballyhoo my “winner” status mostly because I don’t have the bandwidth—I’m too busy writing the sequel and taking care of family to spend hours online. Besides, in today’s marketplace dominated by AI-driven prose, I’m not sure “award-winning” carries the weight it used to. Unless, of course, the award is from one of the few truly prestigious competitions, which do influence sales.

another dubious distinction

The other kind of bragging rights that motivates authors and publishers these days is “best-seller” status on Amazon. (The New York Times is out of reach for most.) The system can be gamed: if you arrange for people to pile in orders on a given day, the Amazon algorithm may rank a book as a best-seller in a tiny category (Amazon slices the book world into dozens and dozens of categories) for a tiny slice of time.

You may remember my asking newsletter readers last September to pre-order PROMISE IN THE DESERT before publication day. Enough people did so to cause Amazon to rank the book high in “Contemporary American Fiction” and “Small Town & Rural Fiction,” the two subcategories Amazon selected, right after publication. Ten days later, the rankings sank by half, and they are even lower now. I’m not worried, though, because I’m not sure those rankings mean anything to readers. People have grown cynical; they know that it’s easy to find someone who offers to generate a “best-seller” rank by “propriety”—read covert—means.

what counts?

Nonetheless, I continue to ask you to post a review of PROMISE IN THE DESERT on Amazon and its sister platform, Goodreads, because real (verified) reviews offer a kind of social proof of the worthiness of a book that counts. I rely on reviews myself. When someone mentions a book to me, I hop online to learn about it before committing to read. The number and quality of Amazon reviews influences my decision-making—I learn something about the nature of the audience and whether I belong in it. I’m told most people find social proof even more important and informative than the description on the book’s jacket.

What do you look for in selecting your next read? Testimonials from famous people? Prompts from media influencers? Or recommendations from a friend? Let me know if you think there’s another avenue of social proof I should explore.