A. R. Silverberry

It’s official! The Benjamin Franklin Award winners were announced last night at a gala ceremony on the eve of Book Expo America, in New York. Please check out these fantastic titles from small presses and Indie publishers. And if you scroll down to Juvenile/Young Adult, Wyndano’s Cloak took Gold! (Link below.)

The Benjamin Franklin Awards is one of the top honors available to independent authors, publishers, and small presses. Sponsored by the Independent Book Publishers Association, the awards celebrate excellence in editorial and design; and winners are recognized for setting the standards and the pace for the publishing industry. Judges come from all areas of the industry: major newspaper and trade media reviewers, bookstore and library buyers and reviewers, non-competing publishers, artists, and writers.

Publications, grouped by genre, are judged on editorial and design merit by top practitioners in each field. The trophies are awarded to the best books in a range of categories. The awards are open to all publishers, and 2011 saw close to 1,300 entries! Three books,  selected as finalists, advance to the final stage, one receives the gold medal, and the other two are awarded silver medals.

To give you an idea of the caliber of these awards, last year’s gold and silver medals in Juvenile/Young Adult fiction were, respectively, to The Kalevala: Tales of Magic and Fablehaven: Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary, from Shadow Mountain.

From this year, I’m particularly looking forward to reading A Carpenter’s Legacy, by Dan T Davis, The Seal Pup, by James Otis Thach, Nonna’s Book of Mysteries, by Mary Osborne, and Lisa Mangum’s Opus, The Golden Spiral.

Here’s the link to all the winners by category: