Those of you who are especially tuned in to industry news know that this is a big week in a couple corners of the publishing world: yesterday the nominees for the Eisner Awards (the biggest awards in comics), and the winners of the Pulitzer Prize were announced. Book awards are a big deal to publishers and authors alike. These accolades help boost sales, allow for added publicity, and there can be a significant monetary prize for the author of an award winner.

Now that The Wax Bullet War has been released, we are beginning the process of submitting it for literary awards. Most readers see the fancy foil stickers on book covers and don’t give much thought to how it ended up there. So, for those of you who are curious, here’s what the application process looks like for The Wax Bullet War.

Ooligan Press keeps a list of literary awards. Every award has its own eligibility rules, so each time we publish a new book, we filter through that list to see which ones might be appropriate for our new title. We usually do a bit of extra research for each new title to see if there are any awards worth considering that might be missing from the master list. (For example, there are a couple of awards for military-related books that aren’t on our standard list because they’re so specific, but which are absolutely worth considering for The Wax Bullet War.)

We started compiling our master list not long after The Wax Bullet War was acquired. Because we were still a long ways out from publication, we kept it in our back pocket until it got closer to to the time to start applying. Throughout fall and winter, we periodically revisited the list (in the midst of all of the other work we were doing), slowly culling it down from a huge index to the ones we really wanted to focus on.

Eligibility requirements aren’t the only factors we take into consideration as we weed through this list. Many awards (and nearly all of the big ones) have application fees and require several copies as part of the submission; that isn’t a huge deal to big publishers, but for a small press like Ooligan, awards can become costly. We also considered the value of applying for certain awards (for instance, some are so small or niche that they might not be the best fit for our book).

Now that we have our list whittled down for The Wax Bullet War, it’s just a matter of deadlines. Some awards have forms, others require mailing out multiple copies of the book, some have other hoops to jump through—and they all have a final application deadline. Part of our ongoing marketing and sales efforts include applying for awards, so we’re working on all of our submissions now, keeping one eye on the calendar and the other on the prize (sorry, I couldn’t resist).

Until next week,
Laurel