Every year, hundreds of independent authors and small presses enter the Reader Views Literary Awards. Every entered book receives a professional editorial review, and from those reviews our team selects category winners across dozens of genres. But six books rise above them all.
These are the 2025 Grand Prize winners — the best overall fiction and non-fiction among all entries. These are the books our reviewers couldn’t stop thinking about.

Forget the palm trees and writing retreats. Michael Loyd Gray says the real secret to writing is showing up every day, treating it like a job, and firing off new submissions the moment a rejection lands. His strategy? Never let a “no” slow you down.

Elizabeth Klein spent fourteen years turning one story into nine books. If writing a single novel feels hard enough, here’s how to build a series your readers won’t want to put down…..

Randy Overbeck is part plotter, part pantser, and his award-winning mystery series proves the hybrid approach works. Here’s how he balances research and intuition to craft his Haunted Shores Mysteries