Dude, Where’s my List?

A Frequently Asked Question

With the 2023 CIBAs all wrapped up and the winners having been announced at the Four Points by Sheraton in beautiful Bellingham, WA on April 20, 2024, many people have the very reasonable question: Where are the official announcements, and why didn’t they all come out on that Saturday or on Sunday-the next day? (We are staffing the Books By the Bay Book Fair on Sunday).

First off, you can see all CIBA Winner Lists as they come out on our website here!

On our home page, these are all under the top center section labeled Book Awards News – CIBAs.

Playing the Social Media Game

While a PDF with a list of the winners could easily be posted, that wouldn’t uphold our promise to help with long-tail marketing and increasing our authors’ digital footprints. We are committed to maximizing promotion for authors.

How do we maximize your promotion?

 

Our normal posts, when not during our conference season, tend to have double the response and interaction rate of comparable businesses. During the Chanticleer Int’l Book Awards, these rates rise to seven times the standard engagement of those other posts, and is still double the posts during similarly busy times at other companies. And that is for each Awards post that goes out. The way we do this is simple.

First, we give each division breathing room on Social Media, on our high traffic Website, and our e-Newsletter in our flurry of daily email blasts that are sent out until all the lists have been posted. The consistent promotion over the course of two weeks allows for each set of winners to have their moment in the sun, and it keeps every post prioritized instead of being devalued by search engines for over-posting.

We also try to tag each winner on Facebook per CIBA division. Again, if we post more than three posts per day, FB devalues the posts which means less exposure.

Under the Hood with SEO

 

One of the best parts of Chanticleer is our emphasis on being ahead of the technological curve. The main way we do this is through a robust SEO package that we usually talk about with regards to our Editorial Reviews, but we use all those same tools to promote the authors who advance in our Book Awards as well.

You can see the article we put out specifically about the All In One Search Engine Optimization tool (AIOSEO) we use here.

Argus Brown and David Beaumier presented a coffee klatch on this at CAC24 to help explain the ins and outs of promotion, specifically looking at different author websites and giving feedback right there in the moment!

While most SEO tools recommend a score between 60-80, we always strive to exceed that, with many of our Book Award posts receiving a AIOSEO score above 90. We do this through our usual rigorous attention to detail surrounding the optimization of heading distribution, sentence length, alternative text, key phrases, meta data, tagging, and much more. There’s no replacement for basic elbow grease (or clicking away?) when it comes to maximizing our posts so that web crawlers love them and promote our authors writing as much as possible. We know from client feedback that it really makes a difference!

Human Beings at Work

Of course, it’s important to remember that we are a small business with huge reach that works hard to address every question, email, and comment we receive directly with care, empathy, and expertise. Putting together an internationally attended conference with authors from India, Australia, and the UK takes hours of dedication and careful planning. As we move into the follow up phase, we are just as determined to provide the excellent service that is a hallmark of Chanticleer. We double-check our work before putting the lists out, maximizing SEO, looking to see that names and titles are written correctly, and scheduling out posts to have the strongest online impact.

Then, we promote all the CIBA winners again with our Overall Posts for the CIBA Fiction Book Awards, the CIBA Non-Fiction Book Awards, and the SERIES, SHORTS, and COLLECTIONS Awards.

And then, the CIBA lists are kept on the HOMEPAGE of the Chanticleer Website for  a year with all those links!

And then, we recognize the Division Winners in periodic SPOTLIGHT posts with links!

And then, well we could go on, but I think you are getting the picture.

Most of all the Chanticleer International Book Awards is a labor of love!

Love of books, love of words, love of storytelling, love of authors,

and love of the writing community! 

We are passionate about what we do! 

Finally, Thank You

Thank you so much to everyone who submitted to the 2023 CIBAs and to the hundreds who have already submitted to the 2024 CIBAs. Every year, the quality and intensity of the competition is better than the year before, and we are always blown away by the incredible work you send our way. We will do everything we can to wrap up the 2023 CIBAs in the best way possible and get the ribbons and rewards out to all the winners before we dive into another year of Discovering Today’s Best Books.

Thank you for making Chanticleer possible and for trusting us with your work!

Team Chanticleer!