Our awards focus solely on small press and self-published books. Rather than focus on genre, we’re focusing on a wide-range of aspects such as characterization and representation. The purpose of the Indie Ink Awards is to empower authors who publish outstanding works, but outside the large-scale publisher. Our goal with these awards is to bring attention to the vast world of indie fiction and the multitude of great stories that can be found within it.

The contest begins November 2023, with the nominations phase. Readers can nominate their favorite books for the best categories. Then in mid-December 2023, we open to our Voting phase, where all readers can vote for their favorite book in each category. The top selections will be contacted in January 2024 to see if they want to move on to the Judging phase, sending a review copy to our judges. In February, judges begin reading. The top scorer will be the winner for that award. Winners will be notified in August 2024, and we’ll have our Indie Ink Awards Ceremony.

The Indie Ink Awards ceremony is tentatively scheduled for August 2024.

First, you must register at Indie Story Geek! Directions on how to do that are here.

Readers will be nominating books to award categories. Nominations will open in Nov 2023, and readers will nominate their favorites on Indie Story Geek. Readers can nominate as many books as they want, but for only 5 awards per book. 

In December 2023, readers will vote for their favorites in each category. You can vote for multiple books, but only one vote per award. Don’t forget to tell your friends to participate in both the Nomination and the Voting phases of the competition!  **However, if your book is nominated, or if you have a vested interest in any book, please abstain from voting.

On Indie Story Geek, go to Suggest a Story, log into your account, and input the title. The system will search for similar titles, but if none are the correct book, the reader can continue on and input the information including linking to the author’s website, store links, Goodreads, Storygraph, etc. (Only one link is required- more are optional.) After submitting the book, the Indie Story Geek team reviews it for accuracy. Once it’s approved (typically within a day), the user who submitted the book will be notified that the book is approved. At that time, the book is ready to be nominated. Every story on the site has a button that will allow it to be nominated, and then the reader can mark which awards they think fit. Each reader is limited to 5 nominations per book.

We welcome all applicants as judges: bloggers, Instagrammers, bookTokers, podcasters, avid readers. We do advise that you select categories on which you feel you give unbiased feedback and critique. If you have a book that is nominated for an award, we do ask that you do not vote or apply as a judge. Interested in being a judge? Click here and fill out our form!

Please see more information on our Be a Judge page.

The role of the judges is to pick the winners within each award category after the nomination and voting phases. Judges will each be assigned five books to read. If a book doesn’t click with them or contains triggering or other troublesome content, they can swap it out for another contender, and if they’d love to read more than five, they’re welcome to! 

Each judge will conduct three rounds of reading and scoring on their own timetable with their batch of books: the first 5 pages, then the first chapter, and then the entire book. After each round of reading, the book scoring the lowest (the one the judge likes least) may be dropped while the others can move on to the next round. But if a judge wants to read the entirety of all their assigned books, they’re more than welcome to! 

Each book will have multiple judges, and the one that scores overall highest for a category will win for that category.

Authors are not allowed to nominate their own book, but you can definitely confirm your book is listed on the site. If you’re interested in competing, urge your readers to nominate your book for whatever categories they feel are applicable. Once we proceed to the voting phase, you can urge them again to vote (whether or not they nominated any books). Authors may be judges, but any judge may NOT have a book in the running for the competition or have a bias towards any book they are reading and judging. (This is true for the admin team as well–no person in the admin team can compete in this contest.)

We recognize that sometimes later books in the series might meet certain categories better than the first. This happens. However, we will be trusting our judges to evaluate the book that was nominated and voted to the top as best they can on its own merits, rather than evaluating a book that wasn’t voted to the top for that category.

Yes! Please join us! Whether you’re a reader, author, or a potential judge, we welcome participants from around the world.

There are 4 phases to the award process. 

1. Nomination phase – books are nominated by readers on IndieStoryGeek.com
2. Authors are contacted to make sure the nominations for their book(s) make sense. Nominations are adjusted as necessary based on author feedback.
3. Nominated books are placed up for a vote by readers. The top 10 in every category are selected.
4. Authors of selected books are contacted and asked to provide a digital review copy for our judges to read.

Judges review selected books in their assigned category utilizing a rubric for increased objectivity. Winners are chosen and announced in August 2024

As of right now, we are only accepting books written in English.

Nothing! If you do see that your book has been nominated, one of the Indie Inked Award staff members will be in touch with you to ensure the nomination makes sense for your book. The easier you are to find, the better! If you have a website with a contact page or prefer social media, we will do our best to contact you where appropriate. 

We do ask that you have permission from all authors before sending a review copy to our judges.