Awesome Indies is the brainchild of Tahlia Newman, who says of the award, ‘My idea is to honour the Indie authors who produce a high quality product and to direct readers towards the Indie Gold that lies hidden amongst the avalanche of available books.’
And it is a challenge to strike gold. Readers are often drawn towards ebooks by Indie authors and publishers because of the competitive price tag. It didn’t take Tahlia long reading books priced between 99c and $4.99 books to experience the disappointment of finding that she had paid for something that, in her words, ‘should never have been published.’
Reading reviews before she purchased didn’t necessarily help filter out the poor quality. ‘When I see 5 star reviews for badly written books, it’s obvious that a lot of people don’t know what good writing really is.’
She found plenty of recommendation sites that listed 4 and 5 star books based on reader reviews, but none where the evaluation was carried out by other writers. Since she believed that there was a need for such a site, Tahlia made a list of books that she and other authors and editors could unreservedly recommend. To this she has added a number of reviewers – selected writers and those with a background in publishing. The list of reviewers is short and, as I have discovered, it is tough to make your way onto their ‘to-read’ lists. This provides assurance that the quality remains high. 
And so I am delighted to announce that These Fragile Things has been awarded a place on the Awesome Indies list of quality independent fiction.
I hope that, in time, my other books will step up to join it. In the meanwhile, I Stopped Time, These Fragile Things and A Funeral for an Owl have been endorsed by Compulsion Reads after independent assessment (Owl doesn’t wear its gold badge because I didn’t leave a space to accommodate it within the cover design), and all four of my self-published books are listed on Ascribe Novel Solutions website, having made it through their rigorous vetting system.
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