I recently judged the RITA awards, a contest run by Romance Writers of America (RWA) to celebrate the best books released in romance each year. Unlike the ones listed above, the RITA is a general market contest which has a "books with religious and spiritual elements" sub category.
One of the rules for the RITA is that if your books are entered then you also have to be a judge. So in January I found myself the recipient of a box of seven books in a range of genres. I have to admit I was a bit hesitant as some of these books were not ones that I would ordinarily choose to read voluntarily!
This is what was reinforced to me as I read:
Great writing triumphs regardless of genre or topic
Of the seven books there were three books that I gave a score above 9. There reason was simple. Though the genre or content may have been out of my comfort zone, the writing was great. While the characters may have made choices that were different to mine, I was invested them and wanted to know what happened (even though they were all romance novels and everyone knows how those end!).
Covers matter!
While it's all very nice to say that you can't judge a book by it's cover the truth is that well, often you can. That's kind of the point! There's a reason why books don't just come with a plain white cover with the title in black.
Sadly, I predicted which were going to be the lowest scoring books purely by their covers. While a great cover doesn't guarantee a book is going to contain great writing, where a book is independently published it does indicate that the author is prepared to invest in a professional to do that work (if they don't have the skills themselves to do one well). And if they're prepared to do that then it's almost guaranteed that they've also paid to have the book professionally edited which is critical for a great book. No one can write a great book without input from others. Where a book looks like it's been slapped together by someone who knows the bare basics of Microsoft Publisher sadly the story itself is often of a similar standard.
Whether a book was indie (independently) published or published by a traditional publishing house didn't necessarily designate the quality of the content
One indie book that I read was excellent with a good plot, strong characters and great pacing. The author had clearly put it through all the rigours of the traditional publishing process with multiple editors etc. On the flip side, a traditionally published book had so many different points of view and subplots going on that even though the writing was good I spent most of the time thoroughly confused as to what was going on!
If you're an author do you enter contests? Why? If you're a reader, do you ever pay attention to what books win contests? Does it influence your decision at all to read them?
