Do NOT Pay To Be An Award Winning Author

There are so many book award contests, and even a few companies that promise you'll become an Award Winning Author. What is real, and what is worth your money? Author Julie Broad says explains what to watch out for.

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Video transcript:

- If you've seen the promises that you can be a best-selling award-winning author
if you work with X, Y, or Zed company, then you must stick around.
Plus, I've got a bit of a confession.

Sounds cool to say you're an award-winning author.
And in my case, it's kind of true.
I'll explain why it's kind of true in a minute.
First, I wanna celebrate.
I wanna celebrate you for being here.
Every Friday, a new video comes out and when it does, if you comment on the day it comes out, you could be entered to win one of these fabulous no boring books mugs.
Yep, for real.
I wanna thank the people who support Book Launchers and I don't know, these are cool.
#noboringbooks so all you have to do is put a comment on any video when it comes out on Fridays. So make sure you've subscribed to the channel and turn on those notifications so you get a reminder.

And then when we go live, twice a month, we're gonna draw for these fabulous mugs.

Now, back to the award-winning author.
Let me say that any company guaranteeing you best-seller status or that you'll become an award-winning author if you work with them, is running some sort of a gimmick, period.

There are no guarantees. Nobody knows what will ultimately be a big seller.
And you certainly can't guarantee an award will be won. Seriously, think about it from the perspective of movies. There are things that are more likely to do well at the box office
and that's why we have a million movies about Spiderman.

I don't care if you put Spiderman against James Bond at this point, I am not going to another freakin' Spiderman movie. But that's a topic for another day. Somebody's going to these movies
or they'd stop making the darn things.

Even when it's likely a movie will do well, there still are no guarantees.
And nobody can say they'll win an Oscar or an Emmy. It's impossible to know. There are always surprises. The same thing happens in books. So how can a publishing course or a company guarantee you will become an award-winning author?

Simple, they give you the award. And the award for the blondest person in the room goes to this guy, because he paid us for it. Someone I was in a mastermind group with a few years ago paid 20000 dollars to become an award-winning author. I'm not sure of everything included in this package but I do know, the big selling features were her, were that a famous person was her co-author, and she flew to a city where they had this swanky red carpet event and was presented with an award. They had professional photographers take pictures and she posted them everywhere.

She got an Oscar-like looking award and boom.
She's now an award-winning author.
True story.
Authors everywhere are hungry for exposure, validation and credibility, so the author award business is huge. Not realizing this, I entered my books into a lot of awards.

My first book, More Than Cashflow, won an international book award.
My second, The New Brand You, won the Beverly Hills Book Award for Best Sales book at a couple other accolades. These awards aren't as hokey as paying someone to give you an award, but it is a for profit business, which is a little bit sketchy. You pay to enter. Which I get, because there's processing fees. But many don't give an actual monetary prize for winning. So what does the money really go towards?

Well, you might think it goes towards judging, but as I researched them, I found out very few actually disclose who the judges are. Does anybody even read these books?

In some cases, it's highly likely nobody does. Almost none will tell you how many books were in your category. So you could be a winner in a category of one. And many of them have dozens and dozens and dozens of categories, because they want to encourage everyone to enter.

Some sell merchandise if you win. So you wanna present to the world that you won?
Buy this sticker, buy this plaque. Non-prize prizes, press releases, media announcement,
database and website listings were all prizes.

And some offer little more than the supposed honor of winning the award.