Last week I received a very exciting email from the Readers’ Favorite® Book Review and Awards Contest website. The Last Oracle has been awarded a silver medal in the Conspiracy Thriller category in their 2018 International Book Awards.

While I had always felt that The Last Oracle was a strong book, my first instinct as an independent author was to wonder if they had mixed me up with a more deserving and famous author! But then I discovered that the Readers Favorite® reviewers and judges are a highly dedicated group of avid readers. They judge many thousands of books every year and take a real pride in their work. They judge a huge range of books from ‘self-published authors to New York Times best-selling authors’.

My second instinct was to check out the other medal winning authors within my genre. The Readers’ Favorite® website claims that it receives submissions from independent authors, small publishers and publishing giants like Harper Collins and Simon & Schuster. Sure enough, one of the authors in my genre had sold over a million copies of her books. It dawned on me that it is a significant honour to be awarded a silver medal by Readers’ Favorite®.

I am someone who has gone through life relatively ‘award free’ despite being a competitive person. I have been skeptical about the value of such awards outside of the sporting and film industry. I do remember receiving the grade three Latin prize as a child but then I had a twenty-five-year drought before I troubled the prize-givers again. More recently I received three significant Procurement industry awards which impressed no-one but gave me the idea of creating a fictional hero ‘Sam Jardine’ and giving him a credible backstory as a supreme negotiator. Like Ian Fleming’s James Bond, Sam’s adventures drew on many real-life corporate villains, professional intrigues and complex moral challenges.

I now understand that literary awards matter a great deal to an aspiring author. We live in an age when there are over ten million books on Amazon and hundreds of books in every literary agent’s slush pile. Sam Jardine has to take his place in a very long queue when it comes to grabbing the attention of the reader and the publishing world. An award such as this gives Sam instant ‘look at me’ appeal and a seal of approval from a reputable and knowledgeable awards website. And after all, isn’t a book is supposed to strut its stuff in the bookstore? A shiny new silver medal can only help in the elaborate courtship ritual between the book and the sophisticated and demanding reader.

Needless to say, I was very flattered by the award and I can only hope that it may be the start of an exciting journey for both Sam Jardine and myself. The bar has been set and Sam now has to shoot for gold in his next adventure.