Contest Season Is Upon Us

With the new year, you start seeing nomination lists for movie awards and that sort of thing. If you’re in the writing world (or a reader who pays attention), you might also notice that it’s contest season for authors right now as well.

For me, as a reader, I know (and care about) the Newberry and Caldecott awards for kids books. And I know about the Nebula award for SciFi and the Edgar awards for Mysteries. I’m not sure I pay as much attention to them, but if I see that the book I’m looking at has won it, I’ll probably pay a little more attention. In the Christian fiction world, the closest to those two awards is probably the Christy award.

The thing is, those awards are all kind of like the Oscars, they’re all done within the industry. The consumer (in this case, reader) doesn’t have much to say about it. A while back, I heard about the Cybils award for YA books. This is an award given by book bloggers and nomination is open to readers. I like the idea that it’s readers putting names in the pot, rather than the author or publisher of the books. And last year, I heard about the Inspy award for the first time. Modeled after the Cybils, it’s an award for Christian fiction from the past year and nominations are made by readers (they, in fact, specifically prohibit the author from nominating their own work.) This year, I was excited to see that Faith Departed and Love Defined have both been nominated for an Inspy award!

The other, possibly bigger, award that’s currently in the nomination phase is the Carol award. This is an award sponsored by ACFW for excellence in Christian fiction. I’ll probably submit my books from this year for consideration (it’s one that authors have to nominate themselves for) — or at least one or two of them.

But all of this contemplation of awards has left me wondering — are you aware of these awards? Do they mean anything to you as a reader?