The Glorious History of the RONE Awards

As the RONE (Reward Of Novel Excellence) awards have grown to become one of the most prestigious awards in all Indie publishing, I am often asked what the name actually means, and how they came to be. So considering we have just announced another year’s winners of this coveted prize, I thought I’d take a minute and fill y’all in!

The idea of an award for the best in Indie and Small Publishing took root in 2012 at a dinner while at a national book convention. InD’tale Magazine had just launched for the first time to incredible enthusiasm in the Indie publishing world, and I found myself inundated with excited Indie authors who were finally given a voice in the heretofore juggernaut of traditional publishing. For those of you “young-uns”, Indie and Small Publishing has not always enjoyed the acceptance you find today. Only a little over a decade ago, there was absolutely no outlets whatsoever for authors who were not traditionally published to promote and be recognized in the publishing world – even when their books were amazing and selling like hot-cakes!

I was attending the convention to introduce InD’tale to the larger publishing world, and quickly found that the huge number of Indie and Small Published authors were extremely frustrated because not only were they never allowed to be included for consideration in any publishing awards, they were pretty much excluded from all the book signings as well by being placed in a small back room to sign books, away from the larger venues reserved for traditionally published authors! Now, you may think that might have been just the convention I was at, but it wasn’t. It was every single large scale conference out there at the time! So you can understand why the talented Indie and Small Published authors were incredibly irked.

                                                                                                                                                                       TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE, CLICK THE LINK TO PURCHASE THE NEWEST ISSUE: https://issuu.com/indtalemagazine/docs/2023-nov-ind?fr=xKAE9_zU1NQ