BooksForTopics Wins Indie Champions Award
Indie Champions – Winners Announced
Bookshop.org, the online bookstore on a mission to support independent bookshops, announced the winners of its annual Indie Champions Awards today. BooksForTopics is delighted to have won the Most Innovative Use of Bookshop.org category, which aims to spotlight organisations that have “linked to Bookshop.org, shared their love and support for the indies and created captivating book lists on the website”.
The Indie Champions Awards were first launched as a way of celebrating those who have taken concrete steps to financially support independent bookshops through Bookshop.org, alongside using the platform in innovative ways. Marking its second year, the Awards recognise authors, publishers, organisations and – new for this year – content creators that have gone above and beyond in championing independent bookshops in 2023.
Spanning eleven categories, from podcasts to content creators, publishing professionals to children’s books, the Awards highlight winners’ year-long support for indie bookshops via Bookshop.org, including regular linking to indies through media partnerships; incorporating Bookshop.org into their digital campaigns; and helping Bookshop.org reach new audiences through the creation of book lists on its platform.
Winners of the Indie Champion Titles of the Year and Indie Champion List of the Year were decided based on sales generated for indie bookshops between January 1st — December 31st 2023.
BooksForTopics is thrilled to be announced as the winner of the Most Innovative Use of Bookshop.org category, which also featured fellow shortlistees Canongate, Hay Festival, Jhalak Prize, The Booker Prizes and Women’s Prize for Fiction. Click here to visit the BooksForTopics store on BookShop.
The 2023 winners of the Indie Champions Awards are:
AUTHORS
- Fiction: Lydia Davis, author of Our Strangers
- Non-fiction: Mikaela Loach, author of It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World
- Children’s: Katherine Rundell, author of Impossible Creatures
- Lifestyle and Culture: Cold War Steve, author of the satirical annual
PUBLISHERS
- Overall Publisher: Thames & Hudson
- Publisher Professional of the Year: Eleanor Slater, Trade Marketing Manager at HarperCollins
PODCASTS
INNOVATIVE USE OF BOOKSHOP.ORG
NEW CATEGORY – CONTENT CREATOR
- Nicci, The Kids Books Curator, kids.books.curator (Instagram)
INDIE CHAMPION LIST OF THE YEAR
- The Rest is Politics – recommended reads from the popular podcast featuring Rory Stewart & Alastair Campbell, by Rossiter Books
For the full list of 100 Indie Champion Titles of 2023, please see this link.
BooksForTopics and BookShop.Org
Here at BooksForTopics, we love recommending the best books and curating booklists for you, but we don’t directly sell the books ourselves. Instead, we work with outside companies to supply our popular book packs and individual books from our booklists to families, schools and other organisations.
Our aim is to provide quality purchasing choices to our website users, and it has been wonderful to see the upward trend in purchases from BookShop.org. Using the links on our primary school booklists, users of our website can buy full book packs or individual titles from our recommended booklists via Bookshop.org, while supporting independent bookshops.
Each of our curriculum topic booklists and year group recommended read lists link to our BookShop store, from which all purchases financially support local, independent bookshops. A portion of every other sale on the site goes into a shared pool – this pool is then split between all the bookshops on the platform, so users know they are supporting independent bookshops when they choose this purchasing option.
Thank You, Booksellers!
BooksForTopics has won the Indie Champions Awards in the Most Innovative Use of Bookshop.org category, which aims to spotlight organisations that have “linked to Bookshop.org, shared their love and support for the indies and created captivating book lists on the website”.
The team at BooksForTopics is over the moon at the news of the award. At BooksForTopics, recommending children’s books is at the heart of what we do, and we love nothing more than seeing the best books reach the spotlight and find their way into the hands of children. We share this mission with independent booksellers up and down the country, who provide knowledgeable and thoughtful recommendations to readers on a day-to-day basis and work passionately to connect books and readers in the communities. In the book industry, this work brings heart and soul. Therefore, we are delighted to accept the Indie Champions Award for Most Innovative Use of Bookshop.org. It is a pleasure to champion Bookshop.org and independent bookshops via the BooksForTopics website and to work together to spread the magic of reading.
Recent figures released by the Booksellers Association showed a year-on-year increase in new bookshops opening across the UK, delivering a vote of confidence in the sector. However, the reported rise in shop closures also highlighted by the BA drives home the importance of the book world remaining vigilant in its support for indies – whose financial viability as small businesses also depends on their online sales.
Nicole Vanderbilt, managing director of Bookshop.org UK, said:
“A warm congratulations goes to the winners of our Indie Champions Awards for 2023. These awards allow us to pay a well-deserved thanks to a broad range of individuals and organisations working year-long to support indies; our community would not be nearly as strong without their continued creativity and support. This year, we were excited to include a new category for content creators, highlighting the symbiotic relationship between the online world and bricks and mortar bookshops, and the advantages when the two work together. In coming years, we look forward to seeing how each awards category evolves to meet the ever-changing needs of readers and book buyers…May the Indie Champions Awards continue to shine a light on those working tirelessly to support indie bookshops, and inspire others to follow in their footsteps”
To find out more, you can watch the winners’ announcement or read more about the winners.
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Where next?
> Visit our Reading for Pleasure Hub.
> Browse our Topic Booklists.
> See our Books of the Month.
> View our Year Group booklists
