Inkwater Press

Only Milo is a gold medal winner, and author Barry Smith has photos to prove it! Barry Smith received his medal on Tuesday, May 25, in New York City.

Soul for Sale was a finalist in the 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Awards in two categories: Best Humor/Comedy and Best Cover Design/Fiction. Author Jay Williams attended the awards ceremony in The Plaza in New York City. Congratulations Jay!

Only Milo, by Barry Smith, won the Gold Medal in Popular Fiction in the 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards. In this darkly funny spoof of the publishing world, Milo is tired of being underestimated, and his path to notoriety is fraught with deception, forgery, theft, and murder.

The Independent Publisher Book Awards (“IPPY”) strives to recognize the best independent authors and publishers with their annual award program. For a full list of award winners you can visit their site.

A Painter’s Life, by K. B. Dixon, has been selected as a finalist for the 2010 Eric Hoffer Fiction Award. This pithy and hilarious novel is a seriocomic fictional portrait of artist Christopher Freeze.

The Moon Lit the Owl’s Way, by T. J. Valenzuela, has been nominated in the Literary Fiction category for the 2010 Colorado Book Awards. Congratulations and best of luck, T. J.!

Congratulations to Steffan Postaer, whose novel, The Happy Soul Industry, won a silver medal for religious fiction in the 2009 IPPY Award contest for independently published books!

The contest awards creativity and originality in new books that represent the cutting edge of the independent publishing industry. Steffan’s novel, in which God hires an advertising agency to promote goodness, presents the ancient battle between good and evil in a wickedly modern way.

At Inkwater Press, we just heard the good news that Steffan Postaer’s latest book, The Happy Soul Industry, is a finalist for the da Vinci Eye award for superior cover art. Books on the da Vinci Eye “short list” are selected from the much larger number of books submitted for the Eric Hoffer Awards for Prose and Independent Books.

Making this short list is considered an honor in its own right. Winners of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, including the da Vinci Eye award, will be announced after April 31.

City of Hamburgers, by Mike Reiss of The Simpsons fame, was recently named a finalist in the 2008 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards in their Children’s Picture Books category.

ForeWord’s Book of the Year Awards program was designed to discover distinctive books across a number of genres. According to the award committee, these books represent some of the best work coming from today’s independent press community.

At Inkwater Press, we are excited that this delightfully funny book for children is earning this well-deserved recognition.

Happy holiday gifts for Rick and Alice Garlock included learning that their book Spirit Unbroken:The Two Sides of Love has received an Honorable Mention in the 2008 DIY Book Festival in the Biography/Autobiography category.  The Garlocks have been invited to attend the 2009 DIY Convention: Do It Yourself in Film, Music & Books award ceremony honoring them and the other competition winners in February.

In Spirit Unbroken, Rick and Alice contrasted the story of Alice’s demeaning, abusive childhood with her successful search as an adult for a loving maternal family in Japan.   Letting Inkwater Press know of this award, Rick and Alice said, “As always, we are forever humbled with the privilege of telling our story, and eternally grateful to Inkwater for all your support!” 

Margaret Hopkins, winner of the Getting Lost Travel Writing Contest

Inkwater Press and Dave Fox are proud to announce that Margaret Hopkins of Brookfield, Illinois is the winner of the Getting Lost Travel Contest.

The Getting Lost Travel Contest invited writers to submit stories of their worst travel experiences.  Inkwater Press received submissions on such far-flung destinations as Paris, Prague, and Kazakhstan.   As is the case for many of the most memorable travel stories, Ms. Hopkin’s winning entry focuses on the journey, rather than the destination, and describes her exceptionally unfortunate airline experience.

Author Dave Fox certainly has experience turning his travel horror stories into comedy gold.  His first book, Getting Lost: Mishaps of an Accidental Nomad is a collection of self-deprecatingly funny stories about moments of international near-disaster. Getting Lost begins when, at age eight, Dave moves to England and nearly starts a riot in Northern Africa. As a nerdy teenager, he inadvertently smuggles illegal radio equipment into Finland on his way to spending a year in Norway. In his college days, he discovers it is not wise to seek inner peace inside an Icelandic volcano, narrowly misses being stripped, gassed, and robbed (at least in his own head) on an overnight train through Italy, and finds himself surrounded by machine gun-toting cops in Greece.

Globejotting by Dave Fox

His second book, Globejotting: How to Write Extraordinary Travel Journals (and still have time to enjoy your trip!), is an informative and irreverently funny tool for learning to:

• Bring destinations to life with bold details.
• Splash those details quickly onto your pages so journaling doesn’t gobble up your precious vacation time.
• Elude your “Inner Censor” and write with confidence.
• Weave together your “outer” and “inner” journeys, using unfamiliar places as a backdrop for self-discovery.

Dave shares his favorite journaling techniques, shows how to find time to write in the middle of an exciting trip, and infuses it all with a generous dose of his off-the-wall humor.

Learn more at Dave Fox’s website, where you can also read Ms. Hopkin’s entry in its entirety.

To order Dave’s books, visit our online bookstore at InkwaterBooks.com.