We were notified of the results of the Readers View Literary Awards at the end of February, and The Conductor received the gold medal in the prestigious thriller/suspense genre. This qualified it for the “money awards”, small cash prizes bestowed on three of the winners from the various categories, but these all went to books with copyrights of 2025 (The Conductor was published in 2022). Not sure if that was a requirement, an influence, or just a coincidence, but the three winners were an historical thriller, an LGBTQ work, and a kid’s book (a quick glance suggested those awards were well deserved).
Readers View has been running its literary contest since 2005, and it is highly regarded in the areas of small presses, university presses, and independently published works. It is open to international competition regardless of country of origin, though all entries must be in English and intended for the North American market. While I don’t have an exact count, there were thousands of contestants, and it’s very clear that these entries were among the very best out there. There are a lot of literary contests, but for small presses and independents, Readers View is among the biggest.
Trying to evaluate a huge mass of good books, let alone trying to rate them against each other, is clearly a daunting and thankless task. Readers View tries to make this a little more objective by evaluating each book on a 1 to 5 star rating with only the 5 star books moving on to the next round. The books are also rated on 20 separate categories, with each assigned a value from 1 to 5. The Conductor not only received 5 stars, it also got a rating of 100 out of a possible 100. So, we felt pretty good going into the final round.
In addition to the gold medal for thriller/suspense, The Conductor received a second award as the best regional book for the Mid-Atlantic. Regional awards recognize works that bring out the flavor of the area and are an acknowledgement of the importance of setting in the book. The Conductor was set partially in Pittsburgh, but it was largely an account of a coal-mining town in West Virginia that had suffered a devastating mine collapse a dozen years earlier, a disaster that had killed scores of miners and cast a shroud over the entire area. This second award really felt good, the judges seeing the importance of the location to the story and the characters and applauding the skill with which it was woven into the tale.
So, I can now claim to be “an award-winning author”, an accolade that helps push my works a little above the flood of books that are swamping the industry in general and Amazon in particular. But this isn’t a conclusion, any more than typing “The End” on the last page of a book is a true ending. The work of reaching readers continues. We just have a new and useful tool to try to connect with them.
I do want to express my gratitude to Readers View and the judges who labored through this process, and I can only imagine the discussion and arguments that went on behind the scenes to try to work this mass of literature down into some kind of manageable system. The fact that they were able to come to ANY answer is astounding, and even more so that they came (at least in the case of The Conductor) to the right one! 😇
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