Podcast

Transcript

John Goodwin (00:07): Hello, and welcome to the Writers and Illustrators of the Future Podcast. This is John Goodwin, your host. This podcast is dedicated to the aspiring writer and artist and will provide inspiration and tips from top professionals in the field. If you’ve been listening to this podcast or new to it, I thank you very much. I would also appreciate if you took a moment to follow on whatever platform you used to listen to your podcasts. Writers of Future is one of the longest running writing competitions in the world.

Now celebrating over four decades of providing a helping hand as initially conceived by L. Ron Hubbard. Today’s guest is Ted Olczak, president of Printed Word Reviews, and he also manages the marketing for the Independent Press Award and the New York City Book Award. So we’ve known each other for well, it’s been at least two decades, I would think. When was it that we first connected? Was it in 2000?

Ted Olczak (00:59): Seven or eight? Something like that?

John Goodwin (01:01): Wow, yeah. So for twenty years. So anyway, it’s good to be able to have this little chat with you. So welcome Ted.

Ted Olczak (01:08): Thank you, John. Thank you for having me and Printed Word Reviews. And I’m excited to talk about award programs.

John Goodwin (01:16): Absolutely. But anyway, since after listening to that little interview you did, I’m gonna throw in some book reviews too, ’cause they both kinda like fall into the same general hopper there. I guess to begin with, a little bit about your history in publishing.

Ted Olczak (01:33): Sure, sure, yeah. Well, currently, as you said, I am the publisher and president of Printed Word Reviews. We are a monthly magazine and we cover independently published books, be it a press, a university press, or a self-publisher. We do do some big five, but they have other venues. We really try to discover new voices through the reviews. In addition, I do the quarterly Book Camp Magazine, which culminates to an event every year.

And then of course I do the marketing and promotion for the Independent Press Award as well as the New York City Big Book Award. You know, I grew up in this business, John. In the early 90s, I started with the trade publications that Connor owned and became part of Prime Media in the library space, in the bookstore space spent most of my, pretty much all of my experience in book and magazine publishing.

I got my master’s degree in marketing management with a concentration in book and magazine publishing from New York University. And that opened a lot of doors for me. It was, I began working with publishers and doing magazines myself. I’ve worked with, as you know, Penguin Random House, Simon Schuster, Reader’s Digest, Scholastic, McMillan, St. Martin’s Press, anything, Barrett Kohler, Soho Publishing, Chronicle Books, Dark Horse Comics, et cetera, et cetera. My experience includes the Book Publishers Association, obviously Independent Press Award, Book Camp, PW, National Business and Lifestyle Magazines. I’ve worked with selling packaging and selling advertising into Fortune Magazine, Money Magazine, Delta, United, 14 others.

I worked with New York magazine here in the city to create the sister visitor publication called In New York. Worked with news community newspapers. Did it for about six years, and that really put me in touch with the in, I should say, the sole proprietor and their struggles in trying to promote their business. That definitely had a profound impact on how I perceive and work with independent book publishers. I sit on the rights committee as well as the metadata committee of the book industry study group. I’m part of ALEE and a number of other organizations.

John Goodwin (04:17): So you get around.

Ted Olczak (04:22): I do. We do about twenty conferences a year. We either are exhibiting, sponsoring, walking, attending. So I like to be out there. It helps keep me honest. It also humbles me and reminds me of the struggle of what we’re all trying to achieve.

John Goodwin (04:39): Yeah, yeah. So I’m really interested when we when we connected up a short while ago, the idea of having you as a guest on this, ’cause I’ve never really addressed book awards. We’ve done book reviews, I guess inadvertently, but not as a stretch direct like, okay, look yes, no, good, bad, you know, book awards. ‘Cause you sometimes when you talk to not so much the established but aspiring authors, you know, like there’s there’s a stigma sometimes connected with reviews and with awards that mostly I think is born out of ignorance more than it is out of real life data. So I’m interested in just getting some, not a total data download here, but some but with some factors on this thing here, just like what it does, you know, because there’s I don’t want to put my book out there because if it gets reviewed as something negative, I don’t think I can handle that. Or if I you know, all these book awards are just vanity. And if I just, you know, just they just want my money so that they can get their stuff and I don’t want, you know, and I don’t get anything out of it. So just some of those different things that I’ve heard, obviously I don’t ascribe to that because I’m always trying to get reviews for my books and I’m entering lots of book awards and I win a lot of book awards.

So I see, you know, I have myself what the value is on it. But for someone who’s, ’cause you got traditional, which you talked about, you’ve got your history of traditional, you got indie publishing, and then you got self-publishing, which is, you know, you’ve got things to deal with. Like I got a budget on this here book that I’m doing or on my line. And so I, what’s it going to do for me on that stuff? And if all I’m doing is selling through KDP on Amazon, I’m going to put all my money into my Amazon budget and none of this other stuff makes a difference because I just wanted to get eyeballs to my book that I’ve got the right, you know, keywords in there that Amazon’s helped me get. So I just want to be able to touch these different points here and hopefully we can get through them all in an hour. So I guess to begin with, so why book awards? What’s the deal with book awards? Because there already is a book award for this, a book award for that.

Ted Olczak (06:59): Sure. I mean, we can talk about the different variants and grades of stuff, but generally speaking, you know, you run a prestigious award program yourself. And I would say that we although we come at it from two very different angles, in the sense that you’re dealing more with writers and I’m dealing more with published authors in the most part, in the most cases.

I would say that we are trying to achieve discovery. When I started in this business in the early nineties, according to Bowker, there were forty thousand new titles a year. And that doesn’t count backlist, that doesn’t count anything. They were talking about and I used to scratch my head and say, How in the world does an audience, readers which about 3% of the population reads two or more books a year. So a very small market absorb 800 new titles a week, totaling to 40,000 a year. Well, now let’s fast forward 40 years. Those 40,000 titles come out every two or three days. And I think that books are sold by recommendation, word of mouth. I feel like their endorsement from somebody saying, you know, I just read this great read. You know, you’ve got to read this author. It really makes a difference in your entertainment or your life, etc. I would say that at the end of the day, awards and book reviews help separate those considering to spend their time and their money, be it seventeen to thirty-five dollars, two to four hours, depending on the on the title.

And I feel that the awards matter because they don’t guarantee a sale, but they guarantee that the reader will take a closer look at your book.

John Goodwin (09:07): Yeah. It’s when you said the D word “discoverability.” Because it’s depending what you read, there was like over four million, over five million books published last year. And that’s crazy, it’s unthinkable, but yet it’s that’s what it is. And how to get your voice heard above the din. It’s not just all these books, it’s a din saying, read me, read me, read me. How are you gonna stand out?

And so anything that you can do as an author serious about getting book sales to get themselves heard and to get somebody else like, wow, what’s this? It gets a reason, you know, you’re one of five finalists or you’re a winner in any of 25 categories in a book award, that’s some reason for a person like to notice you above the other thousand that were submitted for that same award.

Now, it may or may not be your cup of tea, but it gives you an opportunity as a reader to go, well, let me look at this one here because I got way too many for me to be able to search. And I need something to help me to narrow down my search for what I’m looking for. And the book award does do that. It’s cool being able to say, I won, you know, the best science fiction, best anthology, best fantasy, best cover.

These are all things that I’ve gotten. And then to be able to have it the New York City Big Book Award or the I’ve won the IPPY Independent Publishers Book Award. I’ve won I mean Writers of the Futures won several. We do a lot to make a good quality book. And we’ve already talked about that before, but that’s not so much what I’m trying to do here as to I’m a believer in awards. So I guess so now you’ve got two awards that you that you run.

How do they evolve in the New York City Big Book Award? I hesitate on entering it ’cause I’m here in LA. You know, so what am I care about New York City Big Book Award? You know, so how’d you come up with that title?

Ted Olczak (11:16): Sure, sure. Yeah. So I had been selling ad space for a major trade publication in the space. And as some of my advertisers, they were award programs. And, you know, I always felt that the award programs, some of them were better, some of them were worse, but I felt that they’re in the in the general spirit, they were trying to discover and promote authors and I just didn’t feel like they were doing it enough. I didn’t feel like they were doing it as professionally as they could have been. They seem to be and you know again I do feel like I was a leader in this space. Not to toot my own horn, but I think that we brought an agency look and feel to the books that we showcase and secondly a much larger readership than was attempted by the author or even thought about by the author. In many cases they think they wrote a great book and they feel like it’s going to find its way. And as part of my old job I used to meet with 12, 15 publishers, editors, marketing managers a week and I would hear these stories about trying to cut through clutter, even themselves coming out with 30 books in a season, they would highlight five key titles and try to push those forward. So, you know, David Nudo, who was the publisher of Publishers Weekly, he had brought me actually hired me twice. He said he would hire me again. So, David, if you’re listening, just teasing, but he was well connected in the big five space. My wife, a journalist for three plus decades now, had her own group of people that, you know, they did their book review and book award informally. And I sort of brought them together to create Independent Press Award.

You know as soon as we started doing it, almost really within months, I started hearing complaints from the big five. Why can’t we participate? Why can’t we love what you’re doing, why can’t we be part of it? And the answer is obvious. So I created the New York City Big Book Award to satiate them and allow them to submit. So, and that was 10 years ago. We’re celebrating our, this will be the tenth release this fall of the New York City Big Book Award.

John Goodwin (14:13): Right. So you’ve got two awards that you do. You got New York City Big Book Award and what’s the other one again?

Ted Olczak (14:18): Independent Press Award.

John Goodwin (14:21): I think yeah. Yeah.

Ted Olczak (14:23): No no B’s. No B’s here. No B’s. I P A. Right. They all say, it’s a beer. No, it’s not a beer. It’s an Independent Press Award.

John Goodwin (14:26): No Bs. But it’s okay positioning sometimes as a publisher.

So the New York City Big Book is to be able to allow the big five or four, however it’s evolving, to be able to submit their books. And then the Independent Press Award is for Indies and Self.

Ted Olczak (14:54.69): Yeah, I mean we market them similarly because I am in charge of the marketing, but they are two separate, even though it’s the same company, it’s they are they are judged differently, obviously more independent on the on the committees. She has two to four people that are and part of that committee that make those decisions. And we are different in the sense that we don’t do runners up unless the committee decides. I mean, the fact is that if we have 300 books that are submitted into the category, there has to be at least eight to be considered in the category.

So, you know, they’ll whittle it down to a couple of dozen. And their job is to pick one. And once they’ve picked it, their job is done. But there will be somebody who will say, this book may not have had the Library of Congress page, or the formatting was not great, or the writing was a little bit weak, but the idea was there, just needed to be better executed. And they’ll make their case.

And then Gabrielle, Gabby on that side will decide on having a distinguished favorite. So it is very different in the sense that we don’t, you know, not everybody gets a medallion, not everybody gets a certificate. Clearly not a pay-for-play, but in the same vein, there is no obligation to fit in a book two or a book three if they don’t feel that there’s value to that.

John Goodwin (16:21): Yeah.

Ted Olczak (16:22): And then of course on the New York City Big Book Award, you’re getting more experience. They tend to be a little more technical on the craft of it. The structure, the development of the plot, you know, it has to be the arc has to be a little, the narrative arc needs to be a well, cohesively put together. Again, I’m on the marketing side. you know, I get the I get the beautiful task of actually picking up the pieces after they’ve done all the work. They’ve done all the work for me. So, you know, I see marketing as a way of cutting through the clutter and talking to those readers that are really looking for something that satiates their own reading need.

And I feel that the award programs, back to your, you know, the discovery issue, we have basically 15 main categories. you know, I’ve been, you know, yelled at, shouted at, twisted by authors to industry people on subcategories. But as I told the I was at the association of ALA last year, which was the American Library Association, forgive me. They have people walking around on the floor that are part of the board and do recommendations and ask questions about the program. And I said, you know, take business, for example. There are many different kinds of business reads. There are some people that want to read about the Fortune 100 success stories and understand how those leaders made the Microsoft, the Google, the whatever it may be. There are others that are only interested in entrepreneurship, where they really just care about how do I create a business for myself and make this work. And they’re different reads and there’s people that want to build a career. And that all falls under business. So, you know, we do try to take a look at what the writer’s trying to write.

And the audience that they’re trying to address and then try to find those people. And that gets back to reviews and what not, which we can talk a little bit more.

John Goodwin (19:00): Yeah. When you’re talking about it brought up a point ’cause I did one of my episodes several months ago with the first readers, do’s and don’ts. What are automatic like thumbs downs, you know, that they can’t get past some of these I’ll use the word for lack of a better one, egregious errors that it’s just come on, this is a book, you know? And you know, different things like okay, when you submission, it’s gotta be a standard submission. You’ve got to have this type of typing, line space, no color ink, margin, all it’s just a standard thing because these people are looking literally at thousands of submissions every quarter. And so if something that’s a distraction, then they can’t even get into the story because they’re reading so much. So there is an automatic like, you know, you’re out of there. It may have even been a good story, but because you wouldn’t bother to follow the rules then I’m not going to take it any further.

You know, there are those that follow the rules, and like you said, you know, that shows a lot of promise and stuff like that. And so then they get an honorable mention, you know, and that’s the top ten percentile. But with submissions, what are some of the like the hard no’s and some of the ones that are like, you know, let me just take a look and see.

Ted Olczak (20:20): I would say that anything that’s just ridiculously it’s the same old story. You know, somebody who copied, you know, I was going to save this for later, but you know, in the age of AI, I mean, that’s the elephant in the room. You know, you you’re getting this kind of material that clearly is, you know, the words are there, but the creative concept of telling a story is not.

It’s sort of like back in the 70s when we had the, you know, Pong, like it’s a video game, but you know it’s like the basics and audio when it clearly is mechanical. I believe that we’re not at the point where it’s seamless, but I would say that if the trope is well known, it has to have something interesting to it. If it’s the same old story and it’s a copycat.

There’s no reason to discover this. There’s no reason to put an award on it. There’s no reason to. So I think that’s where a lot of those discussions happen about the importance of what makes this book different. What gap does this fill in a collection of books that would be important? So that’s an easy one to toss out. Clearly, we get spiral books and stuff.

Books that are half done, those are not even counted in the in the realm of stuff. People…

John Goodwin (21:54): So if a person does a spiral or if they put it a bull clip or whatever like that, that’s an automatic reject.

Ted Olczak (22:00): No, I wouldn’t say it was an automatic reject, but if the you know, I remember somebody submitting a book and it was clear that the book was not finished. And that’s okay. We actually don’t mind taking ARCs, it for your people, advanced reading copies, A R Cs. We don’t mind doing that, but as long as it’s going to be commercially available when the award is announced.

And to get back to why this got into all of this, I felt the award programs focused way too much on the process and the dinner than the aftermath. And I feel like our responsibility, at least Independent Press Award and New York City Big Book Award, is to help authors be discovered and help them, bottom line, sell books. And that’s why I’ve brought in that marketing.

To the whole program, which I feel that and a lot of awards again, we’re just different. We’re just different. We do take that process. So I would say that if the book is not finished, and you can see that in many ways, we also take digital copies. It took us a long time to get there. An ePub or a PDF can be submitted for consideration, but as you know, a lot of the people consider the physical book the gift and part of their reward for participating. So you have to find people that will accept, you know, reading a digital copy and knowing that they can’t take it home and put it on their shelf and take it to the beach to peruse through. But they do get access during the competition. But yeah, we’ve made that jump.

And then clearly anything that’s just extremely hateful or you know, we don’t mind something incendiary something that’s controversial, but we don’t, will not tolerate straight up hatred. It’s just there’s no place for it.

John Goodwin (24:14): Right. Good. I was curious about that part too, ’cause there is so much divisiveness out there. So the whole purpose of a book award in, well book awards is to be able to celebrate and to be able to, like I said, provide that discoverability. I’m not so much interested in discovering somebody that wants to foment conflict. So yeah, with the Writers of the Future, you’ve not been to one, you haven’t been to one of our awards Galas.

Ted Olczak (24:42): No, you were generous with extending the invitation, but I’m gonna have to put it on the calendar.

John Goodwin (24:49): Yeah. I’ll send the invitation again one of these years and you’ll be Okay, good, I’m in LA because it’s very close to the LA Festival of Books. We juggle against Easter and against the other religious holidays that happen. So we make sure that we’re not violate, stepping on anybody’s religious toes. So we do that. But we also are very keen on publishing or not publishing the book, but also making sure that those voices are heard. We have twelve new writers every year that we publish in Writers of the Future. And the whole reason why L. Ron Hubbard created the contest in the first place, way back when in 1983, was to provide that platform for new voices to be seen and acknowledged. So this year we just made our one thousandth published writer and artist in the series, which we’re very stoked about that. That’s really good.

But it’s also we do a lot of media. We’ve got winners this year from eight different countries. So that becomes its own challenge, getting media in South Africa and getting media in China and in.… [We have the same problem.] But yeah, we do it. So we’re we get better and better at it. And also, for our awards ceremony, we have to get because we fly… The contest is free to enter and we, which is one thing that’s different for us, because the whole thing is funded by L. Ron Hubbard to make sure that this contest continues. So it has. So that we’re in year 43 right now and it’s still been funded by him. All the winners are flown out by the contest to Hollywood, put in a very fancy hotel. This year we were in the in the Roosevelt Hotel. We rotate between the Loews Hotel and the Roosevelt Hotel here in Hollywood. And they get a weeklong workshop and then this really fancy black tie gala.

That’s when people come, when we have a lot of media that attend that said this is, they’ve dubbed it the Academy Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy. So we’re very proud of that. But I’m up to two hundred and fifty, almost three hundred media now for our winners that we’ve done. So that’s a key part of it. When you said that, you know, that part of what you do, which makes you different than other awards, where it’s not just come up and get a handshake and a plaque and then it’s over with they’ve done their due diligence. That’s just where it begins, you know. ‘Cause we’ve got to deliver on that.

Ted Olczak (27:19): Clearly. And I and again, we do charge a fee to enter the book.

John Goodwin (27:25): For sure, you don’t have somebody like an L. Ron Hubbard to be able to fund it, you know.

Ted Olczak (27:30): Yeah, I mean and not for anything. I mean we do put a lot towards marketing after. I mean we do believe in earned media. We try to teach the authors a lot of basics to equip them so that they can sort of quote unquote fish for themselves. I mean I’ll take an example of last year, Nick’s Zoo, which was a natal intensive care unit for the babies. It was a fantastic book. It beat out some of the major publishers. This young lady is publishing it basically out of, you know, selling it out of the back of her trunk of her car. She doesn’t have distribution. It was recognized as a winner. You know, I had a Pulitzer Prize journalist call me up from Newsday.

Said, I just need five minutes. I need to check out, you know, verify the story, et cetera, et cetera. I couldn’t get her off the phone 30 minutes later, what landed up happening is that Paige, who was the author of that Nick studio, Nick Zoo, she got a two-page spread in News Day. Just incredible, credible exposure as a result of winning the New York City Big Book Award.

You know, also, if you go to our Twitter page, I posted a photo. We have 20, 21, almost 22 million views of a picture from our awards ceremony. I mean, that is incredible exposure. I, you know, I’m a basic kind of guy, and I’m you know, kind of from the, you know, I want to make sure that that books are being sold. At the end of the day, you know, you want to talk about exposure. We have winners globally if you watch the LinkedIn page this month, I mean our group from Sweden is running the circuit around Europe right now. Our London winner is doing interviews. Our one from Abu Dhabi, Sara Barry, who came she’s working with Jimmy Newsome on

building a global community. I mean we had people from Australia. The fellow who won, Craig Ford. He’s a cybersecurity expert, fiction female protagonist who is a hacker and she helps, saves the world and comes in from a real-life experience. He won the front cover of Printed Word Reviews this year.

So you know, we’re reverberating globally about stories that are very specific, but at the same time universal. And I think that’s important, is that we’re all human beings, we all have a range of emotions, but they they’re tapped into many different ways. And there has to be something very unique and a voice that has something to say is something that we want to discover and has a broad base. I mean, you know, Paige with her Nick Zoo, I mean, she … I said, how can I help you? And she said, can you hook me up with one of the big publishers? So, you know, John, I’m connected. One of my first calls was to a publisher over at Simon & Schuster who ran a $60 million budget for children’s and connected them.

That’s the kind of award program I want to run. That’s the kind of difference maker that I feel New York City Big Book Award and Independent Press Award can be. And I feel that, you know, and you and I feel the pain when we get lumped in with a bunch of awards. I mean, I know that Gabby’s doing her job. One of the books that was picked this year, at was a Pulitzer Prize winning book.

Same thing happened three years ago, although I think it was already picked by the committee. Trust, which shared a Pulitzer for fiction 2022, I believe it was. So I know they’re doing their job. I know that the committee’s doing it. So it makes it easier for me to go out with confidence, knowing that, you know, I’m going to help these authors if they want.

I mean, clearly we have people that just want to be at the award ceremony and they want the seal on their book, and that’s okay. But we just do above and beyond after the award program. And I think that that major, that’s the elixir that really makes the difference with our program.

John Goodwin (32:37): I get it. Now, one thing I wanted to be able to just ask you about because something that I think there’s a misconception that there’s an old school or maybe a vestige of the old school, like my job is to write the book. Everybody else is supposed to support me and you know, if I put it there, they will come. And so Field of Dreams was great in a movie 30 years ago or however long ago that was. In real life, it ain’t gonna happen.

So the idea of having a book award and then sit back, you know, arms crossed, all smug, okay, I got my award. You know, watch them come. Okay, line up over there, please. And so what I tell our winners when we have our, you know, because we do a lot and it’s always a best-selling book with Writers of the Future, and we’re guaranteed to get multiple awards.

But it’s in your court. If you’re gonna do something with this, you need to run with the ball. We’ll be there, I’ll match you effort for effort. If you say I want to do this, then we’ll work with you. Can I do some more bookstore signings? We’ll work you book bookstore signings. If you want to do I want some more media, we’ll work through it. Okay. I’ve got shows that I do. We got this podcast here. We have another show that we’ve done called The Author’s Quill, which is doing very, very well. It’s in like 180 countries now, and that’s like over five million listeners.

And that’s, so can get people on that, but they need to say, okay, I want to do the next step because being successful writer today is not just writing a book. There’s a lot more to it. And so the book awards is, I personally think it’s a vital thing to be able to, if you can get yourself where you can win an award, if you’ve got something that’s good like that to win an award, it’s discoverability. And that’s just something you gotta do. Okay, now.

You got the three categories. You’ve got traditional, you’ve got the indie, and you’ve got the self. So the significance of if you’ve got it if you can get down this granular on it, like the significance of having an award in those three different things of what they will do for you.

Ted Olczak (34:54): Sure. I mean, I would say that the self-publishers and even the independent publishers make the bulk of their sales through Amazon, for better or for worse. So, you know, one of the first things that a new author, a newly awarded author that would come to me and say, How do I know what’s the yardstick, Ted, to make this book trackable in the ways of sales. And I would say for self-published authors, the number’s probably ninety percent plus. For independent presses, it could easily make up a third of their sales. So we look at rankings where the independents will know by the check that they get cut, and they’re very painfully aware when they get paid or when they don’t get paid. So I would say that that is an excellent indicator for the major five, or I would say the major 50 publishers that are out there. You’re looking at Bookscan. And Bookscan is pretty good in the ways of reporting. There are a number of different organizations.

BISG (Book Industry Study Group) being one of them, but there is many of them that report on different parts of the industry. Bookscan does the book numbers. And you can see there’ll be a flat line on book sales with a small little wavy along, and then you see a review, and that number picks up, and then it’s back to the little wavy line, and then there’s another bump, and then it’s like, that one won the New York City Big Book Award or the Writers of the Future, whatever it is, those they can tell from because they’re not tracking every… They of course are tracking every sale, but they generally look at the numbers and where their rankings are. and I’ve had these discussions where, you know, we we’ve gotten a book up on you know, 178 on the bestseller list that week. Let’s throw some more money behind it. Let’s push it up the list.

So they’re a little more focused on that kind of stuff, whereas the indies and the self-publishers pretty much bank on one or two sources, and I’m gonna say the number one source being Amazon, and that’s the way that track their sales.

John Goodwin (37:36): I get it. So you mentioned reviews, so I’ll use that now as the bridge to move over to reviews. So the significance or importance of reviews. And so again, I’m very keen on the value of it. And there’s, even though there’s not a published algorithm for Amazon, there’s definitely a factor that if you get reviews coming in, it gets more love.

Ted Olczak (38:09): There was an actual group that did a study with Amazon sales only. We took a look at that study, and generally, I’ll just cut to the short of it. It was essentially if… You could improve your sales with as little as five reviews. So we’re speaking of Amazon specifically.

John Goodwin (38:34): Right.

Ted Olczak (38:38): Clearly having more reviews traditionally will help improve. And then, you know, the other aspect is the positive reviews versus the negative reviews. And then we can also talk about, like I did for the independent books group, I spoke to them about, you know, what happens when you get a negative review. Is all publicity, even if it’s bad, good? You know.

And if you want to go into that I can.

John Goodwin (39:10): Yeah. So that’s I guess one of the questions I’ve got here. So like, so the significance of a book review for in general and then good versus bad reviews.

Ted Olczak (39:20): Yeah, I would say the first baseline is what do you consider a review? If you’re in the industry, you’re looking at those Library Journal, School Library Journal, you know, PW kind of reviews, Kirkus, your Printed Word reviews. They are looking at something that’s got a summary. I mean, the Library Journals are I’m gonna say unfortunately focused more on summary rather than critique. You know, I feel that Printed Word Reviews, we are a longer format.

We’re four to five, maybe six hundred words. So we’re not only giving a summary, but we are giving a critical look and feedback on what you’re going to spend the next two and a half hours and $25 with. And we spend the time analyzing the book and giving the reader a good feel for what it is. So when you go to Amazon and you see a five-star and say, I love this book.

It’s not going to hurt you, but it’s not going to help your sales tremendously because that kind of review, and so I would admonish just so we have a baseline. When we’re talking about a review in Amazon, which the study was done, you know, it reviews are not equal. And the kinds of reviews that Amazon does. I mean, I’m a big proponent of Goodreads because they are peer-reviewed and they tend to be more insightful than a typical Amazon. This group took a look and they found that 60, two-thirds of the time when there was a positive review that the book sold better.

Now, John, let me ask you a question. If you got a negative review on Amazon, it did improve your sales, but by how much? What do you think? Now remember, a good review, two-thirds of the time, it’s gonna sell better. So you got a bad review. I gave you a little bit of a heads up. It’ll improve it a little, but how much?

John Goodwin (41:38): I would say based on the fact that somebody bothered to read the book to give a review, if provided it was that type of review and not some hater coming in just like dropping a turd on your head.

Ted Olczak (41:49): Review bombing yeah.

John Goodwin (41:52): Yeah, exactly. Which is a, I’ll ask you about that with Goodreads too. That was a thing that happened a few years ago with Goodreads, which was just very unfortunate. But I would say, I don’t know, ten percent, twenty percent?

Ted Olczak (42:01): Actually, a third. So when and that’s where I sort of say don’t lament over the fact that you got a bad review. Focus on what the reader was saying and try to treat it as best you can as critical feedback. It is hard to read a bad review on something that you have spent the good portion of years working on.

And you know, it’s not to demotivate you, it is to try to refocus you. And here’s another quick thing, John. You know, when I talk to book publishers or I talk to independent, even self-publishers, especially self-publishers, you know, I ask, Who’s this book for? And they say, everyone. And that is probably the worst answer I could ever hear.

John Goodwin (43:01): It’s a falsehood.

Ted Olczak (43:03): Because your book is not for everyone. And if you find that you’re getting negative reviews, you might just find that you’re reaching the wrong audience. And that’s okay. You need to refocus. And I’ll give you I’ll give you another case study. 2024 Independent Press Award. Gabby group awarded The Truth About Horses by Christy Cashman.

She submitted to a couple of categories, is my understanding. She felt that this was a young adult book. She definitely wanted to focus on marketing to that group. And the committee gave her an award for Death and Dying. And she was like, great, thanks. Like, but the truth is, is that here it is three years later. Two years later, she’s down with me as we take many of our authors to go to shows and sign books. And she has sold 30,000 copies. And she said, Ted, you know who reads my book mostly? I said, I don’t know. She said, you know, the 40 plus women’s group, you know, and they’re tying into those themes that Gabby’s committee had picked up and not awarded her for Young Adult, but rewarded her Death and Dying because the theme was so prevalent and so meaningful. And sometimes you think you wrote a book for a reason, but you will find that readers get out what their experience is when they’re reading these books. And you have to remember as though you, even though you think you’ve written this masterpiece, this greatest book, the greatest novel, great American novel, you know, it may resonate with that group. And part of your challenge is to find that readership. And so negative reviews can sometimes give you light to that. And it’s important to take that back and run with that.

You know there’s a couple of good examples. I mean if you if you want to talk about classical examples. You know, clearly there was a book that was written, said it had no literary merit. It was copied, it was this, it was that, totally review bombing, totally destroyed. The book landed up being a bestseller. What book was that? Fifty Shades of Gray. And the pitch was: look, I didn’t write it for literary, you know, excellence. I wrote it for that guttural feel, that raw emotion. And that is the Great Gatsby, you know, a glorified story. Wuthering Heights, you know, was too considered too racy at the time. I mean, these are all books that are classic stories that have become bestsellers. So my, I guess my word of hope is try to take that negativity, redirect it, find the audience that your book matters to.

John Goodwin (46:36): Yeah. That’s actually even all the more important now with the world of, we’re not, that’s not, we’re not gonna go in that direction, but in the world of AI, just even all the more now ’cause it’s cause it the computer’s now more able to better direct to an audience. And so if you don’t have, like if your book reviews coming in, say you are, you know, ABC and then you’re saying no, I’m D E F, it’s right now it’s gonna confuse it and it’s gonna like hurt your sales because, no, the reviews saying you’re this, and your description or the way it’s formatted or, or, or the different pieces to it show one thing and you’ve got your, also all the metadata is set up so that it’s confusing, you’re gonna block yourself too. But that’s a whole different subject. I did an interview of that which will come up in a few weeks. But this one here specifically on the importance of reviews and book awards.

Now an interesting thing that that came up on book reviews, because you were talking about Goodreads. When I come with books, I do the giveaway through Goodreads. And I’d always had this, okay, good. So I’m gonna, because you can on eBooks, you can offer up to a hundred ebooks and do that. So I okay, here we’re gonna a hundred ebooks and went out. And then someone said, No, do five print books and offer that instead. And so I switched.

And on this last book, on the last Writers of the Future book, we just had to okay, offered five trade paperbacks and put up the… And I had double the people signing up, double the people shelving as Want to Read. It’s like, wow, five books, and it doubled the stats on that stuff of interest generated. So that was it, just that people listening. If you’re using Goodreads on the giveaways, the print books, you know, five print books will do more than however many ebooks you want to be able to send out.

I personally like it because I I’m an anomaly because I have my podcast. So I’m reading, I’m reading almost a book a week. And I’m long since past any shelf space. So I appreciate the ebook. But also when I read the ebook on Kindle, I can highlight a word I don’t understand and look it up right away. And I can also tab different things. So when I do the interviews, I can say, now right here you said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So I got this and what about that? And so it’s so much more convenient to do my interviews by having that and then I can store however many thousands of books that I have, you know, on the device. But anyway, that was just really interesting thing I learned on getting reviews on Goodreads.

So now on your own experience, because you were commenting earlier on the reviews, people wanting the, you worked out, you debugged being able to get the ebooks submitted as well. But the reviewers prefer to have the print books they could put on a shelf and they can go to…

Ted Olczak (49:36): There’s that tactile experience and the trophy of holding something that they were a part of and they can feel like they have some sort of ownership. And it is back to that kind of physicality that I think appeals to them.

John Goodwin (49:38): Yeah. So now on, again going back to book awards, because there’s a lot of different book awards, you know, to go for. So in terms of, we talked about your two book awards and there’s I don’t know, there’s dozens of them out there, so is there any way that, besides obviously saying, Yeah, well of course my book awards, but any way that you can actually tell a scam versus a legitimate award? Like if you just Google and you see no, or is it just gonna come up on Google saying, Okay, this is likely a scam or how what’s a good tool?

Ted Olczak (50:38): It is unfortunate. you know, I feel like a lot of the scams sort of go to low end, not no fee, but low-end fees. I think those are almost more dangerous than something that’s got no fee because there’s nothing to lose and high fees. You know, I think we kind of walk a tightrope.

On the, you know, we’re just under $100 for New York City and just over for Independent Press Award. I would say that you know, a lot of people in the industry actually you know foment this theory of if a book award is priced between $39 and $69, that it’s a good award and it’s just complete BS.

I think that you will find that many in that realm do find, don’t do the work for it. So I would say the first thing is check the site, see what the history is. See if there are other winners from other years, other past award programs. Check out what those books are like. I mean.

In our group, you’re going to find a whole array of different quality publishers. But you know, you can find a debut author that has no track history. And you will find Penguin Random House. You will find Hachette on our on the New York City Big Book Award website. You will find Harper Collins leadership.

That is on the website. So the quality of the publishers and the qualities of the people that are being awarded is a good indication of the quality of the book award submissions. So I would say price, I would look at history, I would look at the quality of the books, I would look at what they’re doing with these awards. You know, I think those are those are quick items.

John Goodwin (52:58): Right.

Ted Olczak (52:59): And you know, trade associations play a role in this. You know, I don’t think, I think you have to use good sense. I think a lot of people get run away with the concept of either they’re entering awards or they just won one award and they want to enter six more. And it’s the gratification of being recognized, which I understand. But you know, truthfully, from a marketing point of view, just as I had said with the Amazon reviews.

Five reviews can make a difference in sales and three good quality book awards might make a bigger impression than if you had you know, eight different stickers on your on your cover.

John Goodwin (53:40): Okay. So we’ve got in the price range and whatnot and just doing due diligence by searching. I guess now you’ve also got the ability to do the AI searches as well to give you more it, where it’ll tell you if this has been reported as being questionable as an award.

Ted Olczak (54:00): Look, we have major journalists and major players that submit. We get obviously…

John Goodwin (54:07): No, I’m not questioning yours. I’m not questioning yours, I’m like that’s why I’m interviewing you because…

Ted Olczak (54:11): Martin Luther King the Third submitted to the New York City Big Book Award this year. I don’t believe that he would submit to other book award program. He’s not going around and collecting stickers on his front cover. So I think that yeah, I mean we’re in agreement on the, you have to be careful, you have to be mindful. But I think we we’ve established a track history, you know.

You look at the people that are involved, you look at their track history, you look at, you know, what they’re doing with the award program. I think that’s better than just signing up for twenty different awards and getting something that honestly may not mean anything.

John Goodwin (54:58): I get it. So now with your two awards, what are, what’s the timeline on them?

Ted Olczak (55:03): Okay, so we have, I consider the New York City Big Book Award closes out August 15th of every year. I call it the fall program, but it’s August 15th, it closes out. Our official announcement date is October 20th of every year. Winners are usually told a couple weeks before just so they can prepare press releases. We try to help them focus on getting attention.

And then Independent Press Award closes out December fifteenth of every year. And that official date is March 20th every year. But we do rolling deadlines every eight weeks, otherwise we just get crushed at the end. So you will often see, and there’s a lot of confusion in the marketplace because we do this. It’s just really we will get crushed with submissions if we just keep to one deadline. So we do a rolling deadline, August 15th for the New York City Big Book Award, www.NYCBigBookAward.com and then IndependentPressAward.com closes out December 15th.

John Goodwin (56:26): Got it. Now are there just asking, are there like early bird discounts?

Ted Olczak (56:32): We don’t play with pricing. Another thing that I kind of feel is gimmicky, but…

John Goodwin (56:40): As a means of avoiding that rush that you’re talking about, the end of the thing rush where it’s like all of a sudden you get that curve.

Ted Olczak (56:46): But IBPA might give a, we may extend to their members discount. You know I’m happy to help support trade organizations that have quality publishers and want to be a part of the program. But as far as, we just don’t discount. We kind of the price is the price and it’s we know…

John Goodwin (57:16): I was just curious on that thing because you made the comment.

Ted Olczak (57:18): It’s from a marketing point of view, yes. I would love for Gabby to say okay, but no.

John Goodwin (57:28): It’s their contest. Yes. It’s her contest. Okay. Well, we’ve come out of our 60 minutes now. And I think this has been really good. Because I’ve, you know, I’ve heard, I remember last year after was I was telling people to enter the award, and they said, it’s just another scam. They just want my money. I don’t know what I’m saying. No, no, no, no, no. I entered the contest. Okay, I’ll give it a shot. So I think it’s important people understand the whole. if you’re printing a book, or releasing a book to be able to know that both book awards and reviews, their value and just some here’s a plus on the whole thing that you can look at because with five million, I think it was like I said, five million last year published, you need that discoverability and these are like a major resource for you to be able to accomplish that.

Ted Olczak (58:18): Yes, John. A hundred percent in agreement. And thank you so much.

John Goodwin (58:21): Yeah, and thank you, Ted, and thank you for listening. Subscribe to the Writers of the Future Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve also been syndicated on the United Public Radio Network where you can find these podcasts as well. Writers and Illustrators of the Future are contests created by L. Ron Hubbard to provide a means for the aspiring writer and artist to be seen and acknowledged for over four decades. It is free to enter and open to amateur short story writers and artists of science fiction or fantasy. Again, thank you very much, Ted.

Ted Olczak (58:48): Thank you, John.