Indie Ink Awards 2025

Indie Ink Awards 2025 header art

Books by marginalized authors, self-published books, and books by small presses often get overlooked. The Indie Ink Awards is a unique event that brings together the writing community to celebrate books that have made an impact on us. This is our way of highlighting the future we want to see in books–by uplifting those that shine.

We have two categories: the "Best In" awards and the "Writing The Future We Need" awards. The "Best In" awards should exemplify the chosen category. We are looking for exceptional inclusion and diversity in works nominated for "Writing the Future We Need" awards.

Only self published/small press books will be considered, AND they must be on Indie Story Geek. Those published by a subsidiary of the Big 4 (Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, Penguin Random House, Tor, etc.) are not eligible. If you're an author and your book is not on Indie Story Geek, you may create an account and submit your book. You are not allowed to nominate your work, but you are encouraged to let your readers know that the Indie Ink Awards are taking place so they can nominate and vote.

The contest has four phases:
Nomination phase – Readers can nominate books for up to 5 awards they think fit. After this phase has ended, we will contact the authors to verify if the nominations make sense for their books before moving on to voting.
Voting phase – the nominated books will be listed by award for readers to vote on. The top ten in every category will move on at the end of this phase as finalists. Voting opens December 15!
Authors of finalist books are contacted and may provide a digital review copy for our judges to review if they wish, or they may opt-out of continuing in the competition.
Judges read and score finalists, utilizing a rubric for increased objectivity. Awards scores will now have an even greater weight in the overall score of a book to increase fairness of winners!

Eligibility:
Books must be either self published or published by a small press as of November 1, 2025 and must not be out of print. The version of the text and cover that is in print & current as of Nov 1 of the award year is the version that will be used as the award entry.
If a book is picked up by a large scale (or subsidiary of) publishing company, the press release/contract agreement must be post-November 1, 2025 in order to still qualify for the Indie Ink Awards.
Finalists from any previous year are not eligible. Other indie books by the same author are eligible, but not the one that was a finalist.
Eligible books must be in the YA to Adult age categories and can be of any fiction genre category. We do not have the capacity to review younger age categories or other genres at the moment, but may expand in the future.
Eligible books must be of novella or novel length (17,500 words/70 pages or more).
Books written by WriteHive staff (board members, admin, or coordinators), Inked in Gray staff, or Indie Story Geek staff are not eligible. Any nominations will be removed during the voting review phase.
Any judges for the year may not have a book in the running for that year’s awards.
AI-assisted/AI-generative works are not eligible for the awards. This includes, for example, using ProWritingAid’s AI Sparks feature, ChatGPT, etc., using Midjourney or other AI-assisting photos for cover designs, or AI-audio narration (for the Best Audio category).

For more information, see https://indieinkawards.com/

Want to be a judge? Sign up here!