The Booky Craft Report.

1. Dialogue is the weakest skill, even among winners.

Dialogue averages 66 out of 100, the lowest of the ten axes. It is the single lowest score for 44% of winners (227 of 519), and only 34% of winners reach 75 on it.

Non-fiction pulls the average down, since a self-help book has little dialogue to score (57 on average). But dialogue stays last when non-fiction is set aside: the 339 fiction, children's and YA winners average 71 on dialogue, below every other axis.

2. Genre execution is the strongest.

Winners average 79 on genre execution, whether the book delivers what its readers came for, and 89% score 75 or higher on it. Indie authors who win know their shelf.

3. Books win on substance and setting, rarely on plot.

A Booky is named for the book's strongest axis. Theme & Substance earned 28% of all awards and World-Building 21%, so together they account for about half. Plot & Structure was the top axis for only 8 books (2%), and Dialogue for 17 (3%).

4. In genre fiction, the sentence is the weak point.

For winning science fiction, fantasy and horror (82 books), thrillers and mysteries (63) and romance (21), Prose & Style is the lowest-scoring axis (69, 70 and 69). The same thrillers and romances reach 78 and 78 on Marketability & Hook, the top of their range: the premise sells, and the line-by-line writing is what lags.

5. Children's and middle-grade winners score highest across the board.

The 107 children's, middle-grade and YA winners average 79 across all ten axes, against 74 for winners as a whole, with Theme & Substance their strongest axis (83).

Average score on each axis, all 519 winners

Scores run from 0 to 100. On our rubric, 75 marks a real, published-book-level strength.

By genre

Authors choose their own genre when they enter; we group them into eight families.

Download every average as a CSV (all ten axes, overall and for each genre family).

How this report was made

• It covers every published Booky winner: 519 books awarded between 8 May 2026 and 30 October 2026. Each one's ten scores are shown on its own winner page.
• Winners only. A book qualifies for a Booky when our screen finds at least one axis at 75 or above. Books that were screened but did not win are not included, so these figures describe winning indie books, not indie publishing as a whole.
• The scores here are the ones from full judging, which follows the screen. For 14 of the 519 winners, full judging scored every axis below 75; as How it works explains, an award the screen qualified stands, and those books are included.
• The scores are given by our AI judges, applying the published ten-axis rubric. We say plainly that the judges are AI; you can read each judge's reasoning on every winner page.
• Averages are rounded to whole numbers and computed by code from the same scores the winner pages show. Genres are as the authors entered them, grouped into eight families.
• This is the October 2026 edition, a fixed snapshot. Books awarded after 30 October 2026 will appear in a later edition.