How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter Wins Silver at the IBPA & Named 2026 National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist: An Award-Winning Book Written With AI

How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter, the debut memoir by Luke Stoffel, is a Finalist in the 2026 National Indie Excellence Awards, honored in the Regional Non-Fiction: Midwest category of the 20th annual competition. The recognition arrives just weeks after the memoir won a 2026 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, giving the openly AI-assisted book two national honors in a single season.

What Are the National Indie Excellence Awards?

Now in their 20th year, the National Indie Excellence Awards (NIEA) honor excellence in independent publishing across the United States, recognizing indie, university, and small-press books in more than 100 categories. The complete list of 2026 National Indie Excellence Awards winners and finalists is published at indieexcellence.com/20th-annual-finalists.

Two National Book Honors in One Season

The NIEA finalist recognition follows the memoir's win at the 38th Annual IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards, presented by the Independent Book Publishers Association in Portland this May in the Neurodivergent Communities category, from a field of more than 2,000 entries. Two award juries, two independent organizations, one season, the same book.

An Openly AI-Assisted Book, Read on Its Merits

Stoffel, who is dyslexic, disclosed his AI use inside the book itself: a line-editing and accessibility tool, not a ghostwriter. The honors land in a year when publishing is fighting over exactly this question, with AI-detection software flagging authors and prize committees scrambling to write disclosure policies.

"I put the disclosure in the book because I figured someone would burn me at the stake for it," Stoffel says. "Instead, the judges read the book. That's all any writer wants, dyslexic or otherwise. To be read, not scanned."

Can an AI-Assisted Book Win a National Award?

Yes. Stoffel disclosed his AI use inside the book itself. The judges read it, disclosure and all, and honored it anyway.

What Makes It Different From AI-Generated Books?

These are not books written by AI. They are books written with AI, by a human author who did the work and said so. The AI assisted; Stoffel wrote the stories. Boy, Refracted puts the AI at the center of the story, structured around the Buddhist Eightfold Path. The Third Person turns the same machine into a narrator. Together they are about AI, codependency, and sycophancy: care that becomes control, and a machine built to tell you what you want to hear.

That is the difference between a book that uses the tool honestly and the AI-generated titles filling the nonsense lists. One disappears. This one won an award.

About the Memoir

How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter is a picaresque ride through Reagan-era America, exploring failure, ambition, and the cost of chasing success. Publishers Weekly BookLife scored it 9.5 out of 10. Kirkus Reviews called it "an exuberant life story written with humor, panache, and heart." Midwest Book Review named it a Reviewer's Choice.

The Warboy Chronicles

The memoir opens The Warboy Chronicles. The series' newest titles, The Third Person and Boy, Refracted, launched June 1; Publishers Weekly BookLife calls Boy, Refracted a "truly singular book." Both have since taken medals at the 2026 Readers' Favorite awards: gold for The Third Person in LGBTQ nonfiction, and bronze for Boy, Refracted in visionary fiction.

Did AI Write the Book?

Stoffel openly used AI as a line-editing and accessibility tool, working with his dyslexia, and disclosed it inside the book. The stories, the voice, and the structure are his. Two independent award juries judged the finished work and honored it.

Luke Stoffel National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist

Official finalist list: indieexcellence.com/20th-annual-finalists