B.R.A.G.Medallion Honoree – This tells a reader that this book is well worth their time and money!
Adversity – Endurance – Survival – Forgiveness
Never Waste Dreams— takes you back to the year 1871, as the saga of two young pioneer couples continues. They began their journey in the award-winning novel, Never Waste Tears.
Carl, Hannah, Nathan, and Sarah each take you with them in their essence and dialect. They struggle for their family. They show grit and determination for their land. They open their hearts for those who join them, as a new voice is added, saying, “I couldn’t help but wonder how much our life was going to change in ways I had not even considered.”
Can they find forgiveness for those who’ve brought them pain? Can they survive when nature’s invasion of the land takes away their livelihood?
Rejoice with them when they prosper. Weep with them in their time of despair.
Emphasis in the original.
“B.R.A.G.Medallion Honoree – This tells a reader that this book is well worth their time and money!”
Does it, though?I mean, take a look at that acronym – doesn’t it sound just a teeny-tiny bit like the creators of this award were… y’know, maybe taking the piss just a little bit?
From the What we do and how we do it page on the BRAG website:
“All self-published authors are invited to nominate their digital books (ebooks) through our website. This requires the payment of a processing fee of $75.00 (it’s also stated as $100, so…) payable through PayPal Payments Pro. The fee covers ebook acquisition and administrative costs, and the expense of maintaining our website. We do not accept submissions of books that are available only in print or nominations by anyone other than a book’s author, or their designated representative.”
You can read up on it yourself: https://www.bragmedallion.com/about/ .
H.
Pretty expensive hosting, he said innocently.
Indeed. I keep telling myself, if I’d had a brain, I’d have started something like that back in ’08. I’d be sitting fat and pretty now, boyo.
So basically what the BRAG award tells you is that the author believes in their book enough to publicly burn $100 as a form of advertising. Admittedly, that does say something: one of my economic professors in college said that celebrity endorsements were essentially a way of saying, “We’re not a fly-by-night shop; we expect to be in business long enough to get back the money we spent hiring John Elway to be a spokesman.” However, I don’t think it says quite what the author is implying here.
I think that many self-pubbed/Indy authors are pretty desperate for something, anything to set them apart from their competitors. Seriously–it’s why they pay for reviews, even the expensive ones, and this sort of promo, the BRAG award, etc. BRAG flatly states that most submissions will not quality for the medallion, but as they don’t publish any statistics at all–who’s to know? They could award that medallion to 100% of their submitters and nobody, except the site owner, would ever know.
Thus, if you don’t know what the stats are, what’s the value of the medallion? If you know, factually, that (say) 100 manuscripts were submitted and only two got the medallion, you could feel that’s got value. But with all the shroud of mystery, the lack of transparency…shrug. It’s effectively paid-for advertising, as you say, @Zsuzsa.