Toronto book exhibition to award self-publishing authors

Canada’s first awards for self-published books will be presented at Inspire! Toronto International Book Fair, an exhibition for print and digital books that launches in November.

The Creation of Stories: Canada’s Self-Publishing Awards are open to all Canadians who have produced a book between July1, 2013, and Sept.1, 2014, using any self-publishing platform.

The self-publishing business has grown rapidly in recent years, especially with the introduction of new software and the increasing popularity of e-readers.

Canada is one of the fastest-growing self-publishing markets, according to Blurb, an indie-publishing platform that is sponsoring the awards.

“Canada is our second largest author market, after the U.S.,” says Jason Lilien, director of marketing at San Francisco-based Blurb, which has produced more than 2.8 million titles since 2005.

In Canada, Blurb has 256,000 registered users, says Lilien.

“To work with Inspire! Toronto In- ternational Book Fair in its first year is very exciting to us,” says Lilien. “We hope to make it a yearly event.” A $3,000 prize will be given to the winner of each category: books for an adult audience (age 19 plus), young adult (age 12-18) and children (newborn to 11). A committee from the non-profit Association for Art and Social Change, which is producing the book fair, will do the first round of judging, creating a short list of six finalists in each category. Then a panel of industry professionals, yet to be determined, will select the winners in each category. The judging criteria will include excellence in approach to the subject matter, creative use of images and language and the book’s appeal to a large audience, explains Lilien. While these are not traditional literary awards, the writing component is still huge, he says. “At the heart of this is creating great stories, visually, text-based or ideally, a combination of both,” he explains. Each shortlist finalist will compete for the People’s Choice Award of $1,000 to be determined by public voting.

Inspire! Toronto International Book Fair, held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Nov. 14 -16, will include more than 200 exhibitors displaying a vast range of books.

In addition to the multinational publishers, self-published authors will also be showing their works.

“The whole industry is reflected,” says John Calabro, president of AASC. “The goal is to create in one place the Canadian and international landscape of books, print, digital and storytelling.” For more information and tickets, visit torontobookfair.ca.