Skip to main content

Self Published Thriller Wins Inaugural Amazon Storyteller Award

By August 1, 2017Literary Awards, News

Self published author David Leadbeater is thrilled to have won the £20,000 inaugural Amazon Kindle Storyteller Award for his novel The Relic Hunters, an archaeological thriller.

Leadbeater has been publishing his own work online for about five years, having published more than twenty thrillers to take. Now writing full time, Leadbeater estimates he has sold more than 750,000 ebooks and is thrilled to be the first winner of the Amazon award, describing it as ‘a dream come true’.

The new Amazon Storyteller Award received thousands of entries, and those were then whittled down to a shortlist of six using sales data, user ratings and customer reviews. The retailer then switched to a more traditional report, using a panel of judges to eventually settle on the winner.

The prize opens up traditionally self published authors to the view of established publishing houses, making the £20,000 prize much more valuable than you’d expect. A lot of the snobbery surrounding ebooks and self publishing is falling away and many self published authors with a good track record, are now finding deals with publishing houses for print books.

As well as the $20,000 cash prize, the winner of the Amazon Storyteller Award also receives a dedicated marketing campaign, the chance to have the winning book translated for other languages and receives access to mentoring.

This is the first year for this new award, but it’s likely to attract attention from both readers and publishing houses as Amazon’s voice becomes all the more respected in the literary world.



Leave your vote

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.