Recognizing Book Excellence: How BookFest Awards Uplift Indie And Small Press Authors

The BookFest 2025 is streaming live on October 25th and 26th, bringing authors and readers together across the country. Juliet Clark sits down with its lead organizer, Desireé Duffy, to break down everything you should look forward to in this online gathering. She discusses how they are helping indie authors and self-published writers get the publicity they need, making the event a unique celebration of promising creations everyone should really check out. Desireé also talks about the BookFest Awards (which includes a children’s book category judged by kids) and the people who will speak at the event (which includes Juliet Clark).

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Recognizing Book Excellence: How BookFest Awards Uplift Indie And Small Press Authors

Welcome to Promote Profit Publish. We have a fabulous guest. Desiree Duffy is back, and we’re going to talk about The BookFest. If you haven’t signed up, it’s time you did. Before we get started, I want to talk about two other events we’re hosting. We have our Media Insights Live. That’s going to be on September 16th, 2025. We’re going to have three great panelists talking about how you can leverage your book and your expertise to get more media bookings.

You can register for that at MediaInsightsLive.com. Our guests are going to be Tracy Hazzard, whom I know many of you have heard in the podcast world, Joie Gharrity, and Jackie Lapin, who book tours. Three great ladies to talk about how you can leverage this more. On the 18th of September 2025, we have our Go High Level Monthly Training. This month is Building Community, and you can register for that at GHLMonthly.com. Both events are free. We’d love to have you. There will be time to answer, ask questions, and get a whole lot of insight into how you can make your book marketing world better.

Our guest, Desiree Duffy, is the founder of Black Chateau, a marketing and public relations agency; Books That Make You, a Webby Award-winning multi-media brand that promotes books and authors through its website, podcast, and radio show; and BookFest Adventure®, a biannual online event uniting book lovers worldwide. That’s what we’re going to speak about.

Duffy is an advocate for spreading stories. Her expansive marketing, event production, broadcast, and public relations background, mixed with her passion for storytelling, led her to found the multi-award-winning full-service marketing and public relations firm, Black Chateau in 2016, Books That Make You in 2018, and The BookFest in 2020. She is the executive producer for events, including The BookFest, the annual Beach Bound Book Bash, Jingle Books, and was the license holder and lead organizer for TEDx Recita Boulevard in 2019.

She hosts and is the executive producer for Books That Make You Show, and she’s programmed panels and placed speakers for a wide array of writers conferences and organizations, including the Alliance for Women in Media, Digital Hollywood, the Paley Center for Media, IWOSC, LosCon, the Twin Cities Book Festival, Women in Business, WriterCon, and others. Stay tuned for my talk with Desiree about BookFest.

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Fast Book Launch & Website

Desiree, welcome. It’s great to have you.

It’s great to be back, Juliet. Thank you for inviting me.

You’re welcome. We had a big discussion about your event, The BookFest, the background, and how enormous a project like this is. You do it twice a year. Kudos to you. You must have a great team.

We have the best team. We have fun, too. It’s always an event. We have people who are posting on social media, helping in the chat room, and things like that. It’s an amazing team.

That’s fun. What inspired you to create The BookFest? You did this in 2020, so I imagine you were probably a little bored, getting stuck at home. Why did you start it and how has it evolved?

We would always be at the LA Times Festival of Books. We would have a tent there and invite our authors to come and sign. It was always one of the big things. Anybody in Southern California, even around the world, I think it’s the biggest book festival in the United States. At least that’s what they claim, and it is. There are 150,000 to 200,000 people for a two-day event. Of course, all of our authors are excited to do that from Black Chateau. Black Chateau is a PR marketing agency. They get to sign their books. We do a press release and social media, and the whole thing.

Of course, down happened, and everybody was doing the same thing, going, “Wait, I cannot go out.” Authors who had their books coming out or just came out weren’t doing signings. They weren’t able to do the Times Festival of Books. This is going back. Nowadays, we’re on Zoom and things like that. You would say, “You want to Zoom?” People would be like, “I don’t understand what this Zoom thing is.”

I had done a go-to meeting and a go-to webinar. I don’t even know if those companies are still around. I did corporate webinars, sales trainings, and events. I was like, “Why don’t we do our event online?” Honestly, everybody else started doing events online, too. Everybody was doing Zoom meetups and hangouts, and they were using whatever tools they could. It was so fun because at that moment in time, you ran. You didn’t worry about making mistakes because everybody was in the same boat.

There were a lot of people giving each other a little bit of grace because, like that first one we did was a little bit rocky, and it was a lie. We had fun doing it. We got The BookFest in that first iteration up and running in six weeks. I had gone to Brian, our web guy. I was like, “Do they have this in a box? Is there a webinar-in-a-box type thing that we could do?” He’s like, “Not quite the way you want to do it, but let me build that website.” He built the website. We did it all in six weeks. We were hand-creating all of the speaker pages and the book pages.

Danny Trejo Reads “Goodnight Moon”

We did that by hand, but we did it because at that point in time, we had authors who wanted to get out there, and the bookish community, the world, they wanted to connect. For me, it’s all about connection. If I may, one of the funniest, coolest, and quirkiest things about that first one, so we were sitting around having a meeting about two weeks before it even aired. Somebody said, “Wouldn’t it be fun if we had something ironic and cute at the end, like a celebrity read the book, Good Night Moon, as a way to close out The BookFest?”

I was like, “Yeah, somebody ironic like Danny Trejo, Machete, like this big reading Good Night Moon.” Somebody said, “We should ask him.” We did. He said, “Yeah.” In our first book, we had Danny Trejo reading Good Night Moon. After that, he came back because he had his cookbook and his memoir, and everything. It was a great relationship after that as well.

That is so cool. He is accessible. It was Comic-Con, my kids and I went to when we first moved here. Everybody else had these big lines, and he was friendly and nice. He did pictures with the kids, even though everybody else was charging for them. He did them. It was nice that they got to meet him. How is BookFest different from the other literary events and festivals out there?

We are online and we’re still online. A lot of people are like, “Are you ever going to do an in-person and in real life event?” We’ve decided I’d rather align with some of the amazing writers conferences and bookish events that are out there and amplify them because it’s the same audience, but different. There’s a lot of crossover, but I do love having this virtual space. It gives us the ability to do things a little bit faster and more fun.

Think of it more like a broadcast than a conference. Because of that, we record everything. It’s accessible, even after each BookFest. All of the videos are recorded. You can watch on YouTube and the website. There are a lot of great conferences out there. Please don’t get me wrong. I picked a few favorites, our WriterCon, which is in Oklahoma City, and that’s close by. We align with them, and that’s for writers.

There is also the Kauai Writers Conference in November. If anybody has ever been to the island of Kauai, it is so amazing. We’ve aligned with them. We’ve aligned with Reader Nation/Author Nation, which happens in Las Vegas. They’re similar to The BookFest in that we do day one for readers, day two for writers. They do a whole writer’s conference for authors, and then they also have a reader-focused day where authors can sign books for fans and stuff like that. Those are the three writer conferences and real-life events that we’ve aligned with.

It’s very nice. Are you going to go to Author Nation?

I will be there.

I’m excited about James Patterson. Salt Lake is only five hours away. I might drive down for the day for that.

You’re right. James Patterson is going to be there. They have some awesome speakers. Kevin Smith was there. I don’t want to go into detail because I’m not quite sure. I don’t have it at my fingertips. Juliet, if you go, let’s hang out.

I’ve been thinking about it. Plus, it’s snowing here by then. I’m always up for good weather.

You cannot beat Vegas, right? There’s always something to do, and have fun in Vegas.

Too much gambling. No, I’m kidding. I’m a day gambler. I go for the day, I gamble, and I go home. I’m not an addict. What are some of the biggest highlights and milestones from recent BookFest events? You’ve got so much going on. There’s got to be really great stuff happening that stands out.

Book Fest Honors Mark Coker

For the next BookFest, I’ll talk about that one. It’s coming up on October 25th and 26th. Again, free to attend. You can watch on YouTube. You can watch on the website. It’s cool because of the honorary BookFest Achievement Award. Every season, because we do it in Spring and Fall, we honor somebody who has made an outstanding contribution to the literary world, to authors, the bookish industry, as well as to the BookFest, those who have supported us, especially from the early days.

I’m very proud to say that Mark Coker, who is currently with Draft2Digital. For people who might not realize it, he founded Smashwords. Smashwords, back in the day, opened up the whole idea of being an indie author and getting your book out there in various ways. It’s cool that Mark Coker is joining us to accept the Honorary Achievement Award. He spoke at our BookFest several times. He’s been in conversation.

I’m so excited about all the authors, but we have Tom Perotta. I met Tom Perotta at the Kauai Writers Conference. A lot of people might recognize the TV show from HBO called The Leftovers, which was also a book where the people just disappeared. He’s got this speculative air to him. He’s also written Little Children and many others. He’s going to speak at the BookFest, as well as Heather Graham. She’s on the romance side. She’s speaking at this BookFest.

That’s a little taste of some of the folks that you’re going to see at this BookFest, who I think are our highlights. To answer your question, we’ve had so many amazing people speak over the years about various topics. If anybody wants to see who’s involved with the BookFest, watch some of those old seminars, panels, and conversations. You can do that at the BookFest website at TheBookFest.com.

That’s exciting. One trend that I’ve noticed lately is that Hollywood has been recycling all of these old stories and remakes for years. I notice all the new stuff is by authors. They’re turning authors, great books, mystery books, I haven’t seen much romance, but they’re turning them into series. I love that, since I’m such an avid reader. Although it is hard to transition from all the detail in the book to sparse details to get it into a series. I love that most of that new stuff is coming straight from books.

Streaming Revolutionizes Storytelling

That’s one of the things that makes it so exciting to be an author nowadays. It’s a different world than it was, even fifteen years ago. Because of streaming Netflix, Hulu, and all the rest, we still have that. People can now binge an entire series. That used to not be a thing. You used to have, like, film was the thing. If you got your book or your script turned into a film, that was so much better than TV, which was considered not nearly as cool, but streaming came in the middle. You have the ability to take a book, to take a series, and explore it, and not have to shove so much information into it like you did back in the day.

That is so true. I’m still waiting for Jack Carr’s next installment because I love his series, and only The Terminal List has come out so far. That’s the other thing about it. They can actually take those stories and expand as well. Look at what they did with Bosch. Every Bosch is pretty much a book. I’m a Michael Connelly fan as well. What impact has BookFest had on indie and small publishers? I think that’s mostly the books you guys showcase, and they get so little press out in the world.

That’s the core of it. The indie publishers, the small press, the indie authors, and the self-published authors. It’s hard to be competitive, and there are so many nowadays. That’s a big reason The BookFest continues, and we do The BookFest Awards to shine a spotlight, to give recognition to where it’s due. When we did the first BookFest Awards, it wasn’t in conjunction with the first BookFest.

It took a couple of seasons before we actually did The BookFest Awards, but then the idea was, all these books had come out during 2020, 2021, 2022. These authors didn’t get a chance to promote it the way authors usually do. We made The BookFest Award submission three years previously to give those books a chance to be in the spotlight. All of that was done very intentionally so that authors who have written a great book can be recognized.

In some cases, Juliet, I got to tell you, because I look at so many of those entries. I judge a lot of those entrants. You’ll see a book and it’s like, “This is an amazing book. Why isn’t it getting more readers? This book deserves to be read.” Sometimes you might look and realize, “This is a self-published author. They might not have known what to do with the marketing or their small press, their indie publisher might not have done the description on Amazon, or maybe the book cover is a little bit off.”

We want to judge and evaluate each book based on its merit. You can sometimes tell the amazing dedication that an author will put into their book, whether it’s research that they’ve done or hiring an illustrator or an artist in the case of graphic novels, or pouring their soul into their own story if it’s a memoir. That is something that we’ve taken to heart and are eager and love to recognize.

I love that because when I come across a new author, like a random book, I did the other day. The first book I read was amazing. It was something that came back. I’ve gone back and ordered all of the other books because I want to see what else that person has written. I think that happens with a lot of authors. I know with me, it was my third book, and then people went back. There are very few people who are an overnight success from an indie or small press. I love that you guys are doing that, which brings up the awards. Let’s talk about those awards because everybody who’s tuning in to this has one more week to get their book into the award. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Thank you for that. The BookFest Awards, one of the things that we did there, too that is a little bit different. We saw how a lot of book awards had maybe 5 categories, 10 categories, or they might have 15. It was basically broken down by the genre. You had science fiction, romance. The real tippy top ones. I thought, “This is not fair.” It’s not fair for the mermaid romance speculative fiction book. You’re melding a lot of different genres to compete with all of these other sub-genres of romance.

Niche Romance Bookist Awards

Romance in and of itself, you could probably parse that out into probably about twenty-some sub-categories of romance, because if you’re more niche, it’s not fair to compete with the ones that are at that level. With The BookFest Awards, people have the ability to enter. You can still enter the higher genres, but if you get more niche, you can enter those categories as well, so that you can recognize in a category or a niche, or genres that might not have necessarily come up in some of the other book awards that are out there.

We make it so that it’s affordable, too. You do have to pay for your submission, but we also offer price breaks because again, if you have three different genres, then you could enter three times and get the price break, and even up to five. The winners of The BookFest Awards, so we honor first, second, third, and then we do honorable mentions. Those folks are given the ability to download a free certificate. If they win, we give stickers.

We encourage them to post on social media. We give them the tools they need in case they want to on their own, send out their own press release. We give them the tools. If they’d like, they may order a certificate, like a framed certificate or a trophy, too. We try to offer something for everyone based on their budget, based on their goals, based on whether they want to put a trophy behind them or not. Some people do, some people don’t. That’s the philosophy behind The BookFest Awards. You’re right, they do. The deadline is September 16th to enter for this season.

Let’s talk about that a little. I feel like the bestseller campaigns that everybody runs now they’ve been run in ways you cheat, like the 99-cent book. There are a lot of different ways people are running them. I like this idea of the book awards because there’s a third-party evaluation. You can run a bestseller campaign and have an audience buy it, and it may not be the best book. When you have an outside third party or a group of people evaluating, and you’ve won an award, I feel like that’s a nice authority piece.

That’s very intentional, too. We have the BookFest Bellwethers, which is the judging body. We have different tiers, different levels of evaluation, too. We have that first tier where we have people who look to make sure that the book fits the category and is appropriate. Every once in a while, somebody will pick something and say, “Is this appropriate?” In some cases, if it’s a little too spicy on the erotica side or something like that, we will respectfully decline because we want to make sure that we can promote the book along with all the other books that are out there.

We have the BookFest Bellwethers who do their evaluation. We also have experts who come in and look at some of the different technical things. For example, a website is a category too. We have our website developer who did the BookFest website, by the way. He evaluates them. You know what we do for the book covers? We have an artist, or a couple of artists, who evaluate them because that’s their area of expertise. One of the fun things that we do is for the children. Do you know who evaluates the children’s books?

Children? Do you have children? That’s so cool.

Exactly. It’s funny because they get it. They understand even at a young age. They range between the ages of 7 and 3. They’ll say, “I don’t like this book. I like that book.” The parent who sits with them, they’re evaluating too. I’ve gotten feedback about how surprised they are that the children are saying different things than what the adults think. That goes to show you that if you’re targeting children, that’s a different thing than the parent or the teacher, the educator, the grandparent, etc. It’s interesting to have not just the parents, who are important, don’t get me wrong, and teachers and such too, but to have the children give their feedback.

Advertising to Children: Dual Audiences

That is amazing. When I worked at Mattel Toys, that was always the challenge. The parent has the purchasing power, but the children are the ones. You probably saw that back, I would say late ‘90s, early 2000s, the rise of advertising for children, where, “Mom, I need that Barbie.” I remember telling my daughter, “You want that Barbie, you don’t need that Barbie.”

That’s always the challenge for children’s book authors. You have two audiences. Sometimes that little audience doesn’t get as much playtime as the person with the purchasing power. You’ve got two people to convince in that realm with it. How do we sign up? Where do we go for the BookFest? Where do we go for the awards? I think it’s all on one site I’ve been sending people to. How do we get everybody signed up?

It’s easy. You can go to TheBookFest.com. That’s the URL, very simple. For the awards, you’ll see up on the top where it says “Awards,” hit that, and you’ll see all of the rules, the submission process, and everything that you need to do there. To attend the BookFest, it will stream right there on the homepage. It’s so easy that people get confused because people are constantly like, “I didn’t get a code. Where do I go? Where do I enter? I didn’t get an e-vide or whatever.” It’s like, “Just watch right there on the homepage. You’ll see it on the screen.”

Plus, if you want, we encourage people to go to YouTube. It’s on the Books That Make You YouTube channel. The BookFest is underneath that one. If you want to watch it natively on YouTube, you can watch it there, and then we will stream it on Facebook, and we’ve done X before. Sometimes, the social media platform. Facebook has this thing where it would only let you stream for so long, and then the stream would drop. We always encourage the best experience, YouTube or the website. We try to get it out there in as many ways as possible.

That’s great. I want to encourage all of you guys, even if you’re shy, don’t be that invisible author. Have the confidence to put your book up. You may not win this time, but maybe you can enter again next time. Keep entering, and don’t discount. I think we’re all harder on ourselves about our books than our readers are because we try to perfect them. Get in there, watch it. You have a whole day devoted to readers, don’t you?

Day one is for readers, and day two is for writers. It’s interesting, too, because when we first started doing it, it was authors talking about their books. Folks would come to me, they knew me from the industry, and say, “I want to talk about the craft of writing. I want to talk about marketing or social media. I want to do what you would do at a writer’s conference.” I was like, “That’s not what this is. This is for readers.”

I realized there are way too many people coming to me wanting to do this. That’s why we do the two days. In all honesty, if you’re a writer, you should be a reader. There’s a big crossover between the two. The day for writers includes your talk if you want to talk a little bit about what we’re going to be saying. Other authors and experts are talking about various aspects of marketing and promoting their book, publishing, getting an agent, etc. You want to talk about what you’re going to say?

I wasn’t going to, but.

Author Platform: Essential for Success

I’m going to be talking, I think, a half-hour talk on the seven pillars of author platform building. For me, I think that’s the part that everybody forgets about. They get so excited about writing. They get excited about publishing, but who’s going to read that book? We work with so many business owners who want to sell courses and things beyond that. That audience building is a very important piece. We’ll be talking a little bit about that. Hopefully, people will listen. It’s the hard work that nobody wants to do. That’s what it is.

Register for The Book Fest

In fact, I have a publisher with whom I’m doing some webinars. She said, “Is there any way to make this fun?” I was like, “I don’t think so. It’s work.” That’s it, you guys. Desiree, thank you so much. Go over to TheBookFest.com, get yourself registered for the event, and get your book put in. There is a criterion. I think it’s 2020 to 2025, correct?

The last three years.

Desiree, thank you.

My pleasure. Thank you, Juliet.

Important Links

• The BookFest
• Black Chateau
• Books That Make You
• Books That Make You on YouTube
• Media Insights Live
• Go High Level Monthly Training
• Good Night Moon
• WriterCon
• Kauai Writers Conference
• Reader Nation
• Author Nation
• Smashwords
• The BookFest Awards
• The BookFest Bellwethers
• The Leftovers
• Little Children
• The Terminal List

About Desiree Duffy

Desireé Duffy is the founder of Black Château, a marketing and public relations agency; Books That Make You, a Webby Award-winning multi-media brand that promotes books and authors through its website, podcast, and radio show; and The BookFest® Adventure, a biannual online event uniting book lovers worldwide.

Duffy is an advocate for spreading stories. Her expansive marketing, event production, broadcast, and public relations background, mixed with her passion for storytelling, led her to found the multi-award-winning, full-service marketing and public relations firm Black Château in 2016, Books That Make You in 2018, and The BookFest® in 2020.

She is the executive producer for events including The BookFest®, the annual Beach-Bound Book Bash, Jingle Books, and was the license-holder and lead organizer for TEDxResedaBlvd in 2019. She hosts and is the executive producer for the Books That Make You Show. She has programed panels and placed speakers for a wide array of writers’ conferences and organizations including: the Alliance for Women in Media, Digital Hollywood, The Paley Center for Media, IWOSC, LosCon, the Twin Cities Book Festival, Women in Business, WriterCon, and others.

Duffy is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS); on the board of directors for the Writers and Publishers Network; past-president and advisory board member of the Alliance for Women in Media in Southern California; and member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Women’s National Book Association. Black Château holds corporate memberships with the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA).

Duffy is a graduate of Marian University and Santa Clarita’s College of the Canyons. She holds Bachelor of Science degrees in English and communication, and an associate degree in art and in marketing, and certificates in ecommerce business and entrepreneurship. Desireé Duffy spends her time between Southern California, Oklahoma, and everywhere bookish events and booklovers can be found around the world.

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