If you won the Caldecott Medal, does that mean your work is good? How about the CBCA Book of the Year? Or, forgetting awards for a minute, how about just being published? Is your work good because a publisher published it? What if it’s published and it doesn’t sell? Still good? What if it only sells like crazy once you’re dead?
Making art for prestige is probably a bad idea. Recognition, which is required for prestige, is something you can’t control. Despite what the guidelines say, there are no actual criteria for recognition. For example, The Caldecott Medal, probably one of the most prestigious awards in the field of picture book illustration, has this as one of their criteria:
“Each book is to be considered as a picture book. The committee is to make its decision primarily on the illustration, but other components of a book are to be considered especially when they make a book less effective as a children’s picture book. Such other components might include the written text, the overall design of the book, etc.”
Yes, that’s right, the no. 1 award for illustration is influenced by the written text and overall design of the book, which, often, is under the control of the publisher, not the illustrator. And I haven’t even mentioned the “Etc” bit which is really a 3-letter way of saying, “Oh, you know, some other stuff.”
And so if awards are, generally, bogus and out of our control, how do we ever know if our work is any good? Well, that’s probably the wrong question. The right one seems to be “How did it feel when I was making it? Or, does this feel important to me? Did it answer the question I was asking of myself?” Those are the feelings you can control. If you have self-sustaining answers to those sorts of questions, it doesn’t matter whether a publisher says yes, or the judging panel all agree that yours is number one. You know you’re making important work. Work that matters to you.