Champions Wins IPPY for Best Series
May 23, 2023
Canadian author Kenneth Tam’s popular alternative history series Champions, ten years in the making and spanning 29 individual titles, has been recognized with an international award.
This week, the Independent Publisher Book Awards –– the IPPYs –– announced that the series is receiving the bronze medal in their 2023 Best Book Series category.
The IPPYs honour the best independently published books worldwide, covering small press and university titles. This year’s recipients include numerous international publishers, and the university presses from institutions like Oxford, Yale, and Stanford.
Beginning in 1940, Champions follows Lady Alex Smith, Lieutenant Stephanie Shylock, and Sergeant Mike Strong on missions from the shores of Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and onto another planet. It also ties up the mysteries first unveiled in The Count, and explored by the Royal Newfoundland Regiment in the highly successful His Majesty’s New World novels.
“This series represents the conclusion to a lot of storytelling,” Kenneth Tam says. “It’s a real honour to see the completed work recognized on an international stage.”
Champions became the centrepiece of Iceberg Publishing’s fiction calendar when it was first launched at the company’s tenth anniversary gala in 2012, and its conclusion in 2022 helped celebrate Iceberg’s twentieth anniversary.
The Champions series is launched at the Iceberg Publishing Tenth Anniversary Gala in Waterloo, Ontario, in September 2012.
“From the beginning we had a lot of confidence in the project,” explains Jacqui Tam, Iceberg’s Senior Partner. “We planned our operations around delivering the stories, and invested heavily in photo shoots, design, and especially the marketing.”
Kenneth elaborates: “We worked with a lot of great people right from the beginning — living historian Mark Kipper, who portrayed Mike Strong on our covers, as well as models Lizz Caston and Kris Scalisi, photographer Olivia Witzke, and hair and makeup artist Amy Bridger to get us the right alternate-1940s look.”
This development period helped give Champions its distinctive and powerful look, and yielded some of the series’ most beloved (and intentionally cringe-worthy) character beats.
Jacqui recalls: “While he was getting into character during the photo shoot, Mark [Kipper] kept jokingly asking himself: What would Mike Strong do? It made such an impression that Kenneth turned it into the character’s self-aware, eye-rolling catchphrase. We ended up putting it on swag.”
The photo shoot concluding this collaborative phase yielded images for more than thirty unique Champions covers –– a number made necessary by the series’ serialized format, which encompassed seven years of stories from 1940 to 1946. The years 1940 and 1946 were each told in a single novel, and the years 1941 to 1945 consisted of five or six ebook novellas, which were also combined into omnibus editions for print release.
The 2012 Champions cover shoot yielded images for the entire series. This photo of model Lizz Caston (Lady Alex Smith) taken by photographer Olivia Witzke in a railway workshop in St. Jacobs, Ontario, eventually stood in for western Newfoundland on the cover of 2017’s Epitaph.
“We designed the structure for maximum storytelling flexibility, and to take advantage of the ease of ebook releases,” Jacqui explains. “We came to think of each year like a short season of episodes, giving us room to move the story forward.”
It was not the first time Iceberg and Kenneth Tam delivered a heavily serialized project; the popular Defense Command series covered five years, each with four short novels.
“When the Apple iBookstore featured the ebook editions of Defense Command for many months back in 2012, we realized the opportunity of serialized storytelling in the ebook format,” Kenneth explains. “With Champions, we wanted a format that was exciting for readers –– a journey they could follow month after month.”
The innovative novella approach gained media attention at its launch, with the National Post calling it "a latter-day take on the typical Victorian custom of monthly cliffhangers in magazines.”
Serialization allowed Kenneth to leverage his training as a historian to integrate characters from our real past into Champions’ alternate timeline. Australian war hero Nancy Wake, the “most terrifying grandpa ever” William Fairbairn, double-amputee fighter pilot Douglas Bader, and affable British General (and later television historian) Brian Horrocks became recurring members of the cast members. The most important historical inclusion was a ship: HMCS Sackville, Canada’s Naval Memorial, which currently resides in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and which Kenneth repeatedly invited readers to support (become a trustee here).
“I was lucky to form a relationship with Sackville because of the Defense Command series,” Kenneth says. “Since she actually lived through the 1940s, I had to include her in the series, along with some of her twenty-first century crew –– Pat Jessup, Steve Rowland, and the late and truly great Captain Jim Reddy. In our alternate timeline, this little ship and her crew literally saved two worlds.”
Visiting HMCS Sackville in drydock at Canadian Forces Base Halifax in 2018. Pictured with Kenneth Tam is Lieutenant Commander Jim Reddy, RCN (retired), then of the Canadian Naval Memorial Trust. A fictional version of Captain Reddy would prove instrumental to saving the world –– twice –– in Champions. After an accomplished career with the Canadian Navy, and decades in service of Sackville, Jim Reddy crossed the bar in 2019.
This blend of historical, modern, and fantastic themes and characters fueled a decade of rich storytelling, which now been recognized.
The win for Champions is the fourth time an Iceberg Publishing title has brought home an IPPY medallion. The tenth anniversary edition of A Daughter’s Gift received a silver in the memoir category in 2013, and in 2021, That Wolfdog Lifestyle received a bronze in the animals/pets category.
“We’re delighted to receive this sort of acknowledgement after a decade of work,” Jacqui says.
The story of the Champions has concluded, and for the moment Kenneth Tam has taken a step back from long-form fiction. After more than three million words in print spanning over sixty novels and novellas, he and his wife Jeannine have recently begun collaborating on children’s storybooks in the Mister Bigflop series, and he has also taken on a new role as the Assistant Director of the University of Alberta’s $75 million Future Energy Systems research program.
Asked whether the IPPY will encourage him to carve out more time for a return to long-form fiction, Kenneth smiles: “Probably –– eventually.”
