Do literary awards help your fiction writing career? After starting my writing career in 1992 and my editing and publishing career in 1996, I can firmly say yes. Literary awards improve public awareness of your book and increase book sales.

The reason award winning books sell more is the award is a powerful third party (independent) endorsement. When someone with no financial interest in a book goes out of their way to read it and honor it, the public takes notice. This is the same reason why book reviews have more impact than an expensive advertising campaign.

Now that said, it does takes time, effort and usually at the very least a little money (if not more) to place your book in the running for an award. Almost any award. You should plan this cost into your promotional and marketing efforts for the book.

If you’re interested in going in this direction, step one is do some Internet research to find all the different award competitions to which you might be able to submit your work. There are always the big name competitions in your genre. Everyone knows these and they’re easy to find. But, there are also many smaller awards out there given sometimes by quite unlikely sources.

Do not make the mistake of either overlooking, or underestimating, these awards. Any official notice, praise or singling-out of your work, no matter what the source has the potential to increase book sales (you know the old adage — there’s no such thing as bad publicity).

Step two is to pay whatever small entrance fee might be connected to the award you’re going after. This should only be done, however, if you get the sense that the award is genuine, or at least respected. There are competitions out there which are merely set up to rake in entrance fees. Oh, someone will win the award, but there isn’t quite the same amount of prestige attached to such an “honor.”

Step three, of course, is to send a copy of the book or e-book to the panel of judges.

For example: My publishing company published a military science fiction anthology entitled Breach the Hull in 2007. That was the first year we started publishing e-book versions of most titles. The editor and his wife, Mike McPhail and Danielle Ackley-McPhail, found an e-book literary award online and decided to enter the book’s Microsoft Glassbook e-book version. It was a good call on their part — Breach the Hull won the 2007 Dream Realm Award for best e-book anthology! Sales of the title have steadily increased as the publicity from the award has spread across the Internet and genre conventions.

Of course, winning is just the beginning. Once you have the award in hand, then you want to display (with all the bells and whistles you can manage) the logo of the contest on your websites and provide it to interviewers in the media as well. Create a cardboard stand up of the book cover and award logo to take with you to conventions. Something plastered with the words “Winner of the So & So Award!” Mention the fact that the book won the award on every panel you are a part of at conventions. Let the world know about the award at every reasonable opportunity.

Second example: In 2008, Marietta Publishing published the follow up book to the Amazon best-selling Bad-Ass Faeries. The second book in the series is titled Bad-Ass Faeries 2: Just Plain Bad. One of the four editors is Danielle Ackley-McPhail. She decided to enter the e-book version in a literary award contest. In March of 2009, it was announced that Bad-Ass Faeries 2 had won the 2009 Eppie Award for best e-book anthology! (Eppie Awards go by the year the award is awarded, not the year of publication.)

Danielle and Mike are using the internet to track down what is waiting out there for all authors and small press editors and publishers. Winning the awards means all the hard work they put into writing their stories and putting together their anthologies has now paid off in a bigger way, but they had to do the work to find the competitions. These opportunities don’t come knocking even the much-talked-about one time on your door.

You have to go find them.

The bottom line is, plan ahead to enter your books in literary award contests. They will help publicize your title and improve your book sales. It certainly does not hurt to have a few awards on your resume as an author, either.

Trust us.