Uncommon Scents was shortlisted for the prestigious Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize. The Eric Hoffer Book Award is one of the largest international book awards for small, academic, and independent presses. Fewer than five percent of nominated books are shortlisted for the grand prize.
It’s a big deal. The Eric Hoffer Award is highly esteemed and selective. We are now Award Winning Authors. We intend to remind you of that frequently.
We now believe that the Eric Hoffer judges are some of the smartest and most discerning readers on the planet as well as allegedly very good looking.
They did not stop there. The Hoffer judges like Uncommon Scents. They really, really like it.
Uncommon Scents was a finalist for the First Horizon Award, given to debut authors.
It also received an Honorable Mention in the Science Fiction/Fantasy category.
But wait! There’s more!
Uncommon Scents was a finalist in the First Novel category of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the largest International awards program for indie authors and independent publishers.
Let’s talk about what it means.
There are many book awards. You’ve heard of a few of them – the Nobel Prize for Literature, for example, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and nonfiction books. The Booker Prize in the UK and the National Book Award in the US are prestigious literary awards. Many genres have their own high-profile awards: science fiction, the Hugo and Nebula Awards; mysteries, the Edgar Award.
Each of those is effectively limited to books released by traditional publishers. Being on the shortlist for one of them is itself a mark of distinction, much like being nominated for an Academy Award.
The Eric Hoffer Book Award is the preeminent award for self-published and small press books. Its mission statement:
“The Hoffer Award was founded at the start of the 21st century (with permission from the Eric Hoffer Estate) to honor freethinking writers and independent books of exceptional merit. The commercial environment for today’s writers has all but crushed the circulation of ideas. It seems strange that in the Information Age many books are blocked from wider circulation, and powerful writing is barred from publication or buried alive on the Internet. Furthermore, many of the top literary prizes will not even consider independent books or previously unpublished prose, choosing instead to become the marketing arms of large presses.
“The “Hoffer” honored prose is largely unpublished, and the books are chiefly from small, academic, and micro presses, including self-published offerings. Throughout the centuries, writers such as Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Wolfe have taken the path of self-publishing rather than have their ideas forced into a corporate or sociopolitical mold.”
It is a signal honor to be chosen for the Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize shortlist. We are grateful to the Eric Hoffer judges for their recognition.
Next Generation Indie Book Awards are also considered to be reputable. They have a high profile and provide some assurance that books are actually read and fairly judged. They get a high volume of submissions and they break down genres into micro-niches so they can give a lot of awards. We are happy that Uncommon Scents was a finalist in the First Novel category.
There are many other book awards. Some of them are honest and the judges are hardworking and the awards make winners proud.
It’s 2024 and the world is horrible, so there are also hundreds of effectively bogus book awards. They all have websites, they all turn up in web searches, and the process is more or less that you give them fifty or a hundred dollars and they give your book an “award.” It’s transactional. They range from merely gross to being outright scams.
The Eric Hoffer Awards and Next Generation Indie Book Awards are genuine competitions with good reputations.
Jim and I are proud and grateful that Uncommon Scents was read by real judges and deemed worthy. We hope it made them laugh.
Have you read it yet? Get a copy for your bedside table or your Kindle and pick it up instead of your phone sometime. It might make you laugh too.
And if you happen to want to give it an honorable mention or make it a finalist, leave a review on Amazon. It turns out that Jim and I thrive on external validation.
