Hello everyone!

Top 5 Tuesday is a weekly meme created by Bionic Bookworm, and it’s now hosted by Meeghan Reads. If you’re interested in participating, check out their wonderful blog to get the details and the prompts for each week!

This week’s Top 5 Tuesday topic is a freebie and I’ve decided to use this opportunity to talk about BBNYA. BBNYA (Book Blogger Novel of the Year Award) is an annual award for Indie books that is judged by book bloggers from all around the world. Its goal is to give under-appreciated and lesser-known Indie authors a chance to make themselves known while also showing off the power of book bloggers. Sign-ups for the 2023 round of BBNYA open on February 10^th and I thought today would be a good opportunity to tell you why you should join BBNYA this year.

Discover Great Indie Books – One of my favourite things about being a BBNYA panellist is discovering fantastic Indie books that I wouldn’t have otherwise stumbled upon. Between the excerpts I’ve read in each round and looking at the BBNYA Goodreads page, BBNYA has added quite a few books to my TBR. I have a list of books I read excerpts for in rounds one and two that I want to read and I don’t think I would have found any of these books without the help of BBNYA.

Readers Discover Your Books – If you’re an Indie author, you should consider entering your book in BBNYA because it can help readers discover your book. As I mentioned in my previous point, I’ve discovered a ton of great books through this competition. I’ve heard countless stories from other panellists about how much they loved some of their excerpts or how one of their favourite reads of the year was from BBNYA. BBNYA also does a great job showing off all of the books entered into the competition. Between their Goodreads, TheStoryGraph, and Twitter and all of the reading the panellists do, BBNYA is a great way to help readers discover your book.

Meet Other Bloggers – One of the many perks of being a panellist is that you get to meet other book bloggers. Each year, the panellists are broken up into smaller groups to help make sure everything runs smoothly. These group chats are a great way to meet and connect with other book bloggers. There’s also a Discord for BBNYA panellists. BBNYA also runs spotlight tours for the semi-finalists and blog tours for the finalists, and the group chats for these tours is another great way to connect with other book bloggers.

The Prizes – If reading great books (or having people read your book if you’re an author) and making new friends isn’t enough of an incentive to sign-up for BBNYA, maybe the prizes will entice you to join. There are some fantastic prizes lined up for 2024. The semi-finalists that don’t make it to the finals get a spotlight tour hosted by The Write Reads. The fifteen finalists get blog tours hosted by The Write Reads and some amazing bookmarks from Bookmarks by Danni. There’s even a cash prize for the books that come in first, second, and third! There‘s also bragging rights at stake, which are very important. For the panellists, there are quite a few giveaways planned for 2023 including some giveaways in partnership with The Folio Society.

It’s Fun! – BBNYA is a fun competition to be a part of. The competition keeps growing and 2023 is going to be the biggest year so far. There are tons of great books to read and discover, people to meet, and who doesn’t love a competition?

If you’re interested in joining the 2023 round of BBNYA, sign-ups for authors and panellists open up on February 10^th. For more information on the competition and how to sign up, check out the website. The information for 2023 should be posted very soon.

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