Monday 11 May 2009

The Book Awards

After much deliberation, the new Awards will simply be called 'The Book Awards'!

Each month readers will vote for just one Award so the next will be the 'The Book Award for May 2009'.

The domain thebookawards.com has been registered and the site will now be updated to reflect the new name and remove the sales side.

Previous votes for the AmazonClicks Awards will be carried over and rank ordered again for this month shortly.

Thank you for your patience over the past few weeks and especially for the very warm emails of support.

Finally, a short note to the authors who have been nominated over the months since we started;

Please be in no doubt, it's an achievement to inspire people to take the trouble to vote for your work. The winners of these awards should be proud they have evoked that inspiration.

Pete

Tuesday 5 May 2009

Lame attacks - still..

Well friends, it appears we are being attacked by a self-publicist running a blog site who is trying to attract readers by attacking others.

I won't publish his blogs name (if you really want it just email me) as that is clearly what he's hoping for, but basically he accuses us of trading off Amazon's name and running meaningless awards. I'm guessing he's never won an award and is envious of those of you who have attracted hundreds of votes for your titles.

If you come across this sort of vitriol, I suggest you just ignore it because his is only one tiny, unknown voice against the many that have praised your achievements.

As for the Amazon name, I think it's pretty clear on every page of this site that we aren't trading off it, despite the fact that Amazon were perfectly content having an approved Associates relationship with us for many months through 2008 and accepting thousands of visitors as a result.

Still... now that relationship has ended and rather than give fuel to the mindless ramblings of people like the aforementioned, I intend to change the name in the near future.

I will send out a notice when it is done and clearly I will post an update here but any links you have created will be re-directed to the new site. After long consideration and polling onions around the Internet, I've decided not to pursue the eBook or any other type of selling on line. The new awards site will be just that, exclusively awards.

Personally I find it sad that people spend time portraying themselves as the 'custodians of the publishing world' when in fact they are simply promoting their own blog site, but aspiring authors should not be deterred from continuing to write. These people are in the minority and few have even heard of them so they will have no impact on the prospects for your work.

Pete

Saturday 2 May 2009

And the winner for April is .....

Angels in Mourning by David Wind!

Congratulations David for taking the title this month after quite a number of weeks in the top ratings.

As previously mentioned, the site is about to undergo so changes so please bear with me whilst this happens. This needed prevent you from voting for your favorite title though, I'll still be counting!