November 2024 Book Awards You Can Apply for Today

A few weeks ago in the Buoyancy community weekly email, we wrote about book awards and suggested you check them out if you are an author or are writing a book.

Winning a book award, or even an honorable mention, can be a helpful element in the marketing program for your books, new as well as not-so-new, to help boost sales and grow awareness of you and your books.

In the previous note, we mentioned we realized when we dug into this topic that really it needed to be more than one email. This note is the second of three we will write on book awards.

Today we are back highlighting three specific award competitions with which we are familiar, and that are still accepting entries for their 2025 awards. Of course, these aren’t the only ones.

First of all, it bears repeating that there are scores of book awards, and they are not all created equal. A quick Google search will lead you to pages of entries of book awards and it can be very difficult to differentiate the good from the bad.

Remember this isn’t our area of expertise, but some awards we are a bit familiar with, so we are at least comfortable telling you about. To reiterate, this is information for your own evaluation, not a recommendation.

They are far from the only competitions, so the most important part of this message is to do your own research and see what you find.

Once you do find some that you want to apply for, as we stated before, each award competition has its own rules and requirements for entry, so one needs to pay careful attention to get your entry submissions completed correctly and on time.

Generally speaking, the awards are open annually to books recently published. Interestingly, however, some of the awards also have a category or division for older books, so as you continue to market older titles, you may still be able to win an award.

Each award sets its own calendar, so some we will still tell you about later have closed their entries for their next award cycle.

Another thing to note is that the larger, and more prestigious the Award Program, the more competitive the process. But an award is an award and the value to you with readers is likely not all that different since chances are they aren’t all that familiar with the awards anyway.

Now here are the three book awards with which we are familiar, and that are still accepting entries for their 2025 awards:

Christian Literary Awards

A few years ago, we discovered the Christian Literary Awards, because we got acquainted with representatives of Joy and Company’s radio show at NRB. This award competition is sponsored by Joy and Company and includes an interesting twist because the organizers have a radio show, and a radio interview book review is a benefit of books accepted into the competition.

“The Review with Joy & Company Radio Show streams live from Fishbowl Studios on Mondays at 7:00 PM CST and 8:00 PM CST. The show also streams live from our Facebook page: Joy & Company/Christian Literary Awards,” their website states.

They are currently accepting books published in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 for their 13th Annual Christian Literary Awards 2025.

They are accepting Christian books in these categories: Business & Finance, Children’s, Christian Living, Fiction, Health & Fitness, Historical Fiction, Inspirational, Non-Fiction, Memoirs, Motivational, Poetry, Testimonials, and Youth & Young Adult.

Details on entering and how the category entries work is all available here.

Deadline for entries is January 31, 2025.

Illumination Awards

Illumination Awards have many categories in two divisions and are accepting entries for their 2025 awards. Self-described on their website as, “Shining a light on exemplary Christian books since 2013,” the Illumination Awards are open to independently and traditionally published books.

The award website states the awards were “created to celebrate the best new titles written from a Christian perspective.”

They have more than 25 categories including Bible Study, Devotional, Fiction, and Children’s Picture Books. The Illumination Awards has two divisions. The General Categories for current books is currently accepting nominations for 2025 awards of books published between 2023 and 2025. There are more than 20 genre and sub-genre categories in the General competition.

Interestingly, however, they also have another category called Enduring Light with far fewer categories, but books eligible for this just need to have been published since 2000. At least one other book award we’ve had contact with also had a category for older books to still be eligible to receive honors.

The deadline for applying for these awards is January 8, 2025, but there are details to that deadline about postmarks and online requirements so please consult them to get it right.

The Illumination Awards are owned and administered by the Jenkins Group, a publishing servicing group owned by Jerrold Jenkins that also has five other book award contests: the Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards, Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards, Living Now Book Awards, Axiom Business Book Awards, and the eLit Book Awards. [Note: while the Illumination Awards are quite credible, this is not the same Jerry Jenkins that wrote the Left Behind series, among his other claims to fame.]

The BookLife Prize

Publishers Weekly, the primary trade publication/communication and review company for publishing and authors, created a division called BookLife when independent publishing began to take off more than a decade ago. We referenced it briefly last week when we spoke about PW.

But BookLife also gives awards, and Christian authors may be most interested in (but not limited to) submitting in their Inspirational/Spiritual category. They describe their awards this way:

“The BookLife Prize is an annual writing competition in two Contests (Fiction and Nonfiction) sponsored by BookLife and Publishers Weekly. The Prize seeks to support independent authors and discover great written works in nine categories across the two Sections. The categories in the Fiction Contest are: Romance/Erotica; Mystery/Thriller; Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror; General Fiction; and Middle-Grade & YA Fiction. The categories in the Nonfiction Contest are: Memoir/Autobiography; Self-Help; Inspirational/Spiritual; and Business/Personal Finance. The Prize is judged by PW reviewers, editors, acclaimed authors, and publishing veterans, and awards are given to finalists in each Contest’s categories, with a grand cash prize of $5,000 going to the most outstanding finalist in each Contest.”

While the Fiction division has closed, the BookLife Prize Nonfiction Contest is now open through January 31, 2025.

Today’s note still barely scratches the surface on all the awards out there. But before the end of the year, we’ll be back one more time on a couple of other awards to know about for future reference.

And finally, this note comes with an expression of gratitude for these award competitions. A few of you paying attention may also remember that this November (well technically we started in October) we are doing a series we’re calling Thankful For. Conveniently, even this book awards topic fits that theme because book awards, like author organizations and writing conferences, are all part of the larger author community, both Christian and secular, which supports authors.

Here at Buoyancy, we are Thankful For all of those professionals who encourage, coach and celebrate authors.