Every industry has its awards and publishing is no exception. In fact, in publishing every genre has its own awards, and sometimes several sets. Science fiction and fantasy has the Hugos, Nebulas and the World Fantasy Award. Westerns have the Spur Award and mysteries have the Edgars. In Romance, there’s the Rita and the Golden Heart, of course, but almost half of the thirty categories in the EPPIE awards, for electronic publishing, are dedicated to romance or erotic romance. On the GLBT side there are the Lambda Literary awards and the Gaylactic Spectrum awards, both of which are open to romance and erotica.
It’s exciting to be involved in an award cycle, whether you’re nominating and voting, or whether you’re a writer who has something in the running, or whether a friend or even just a favorite author has a story up for an award. My husband and I attend the Hugo ceremony whenever we’re at the World Science Fiction Convention, and it’s always fun just to be there, even if my favorites don’t win.
But when it’s all over and the statues have been presented and the parents thanked and the results published, how much difference do the awards make to the writers who win them? Sometimes books are marked as award winners for marketing purposes. Do you look for award winners when you’re shopping for books? Do awards influence your purchases? Or make it more likely you’ll pick a book up and read the blurb? Or do they influence you not at all? Does it make a difference which award was won?
Ideally, readers should always “win” when fiction awards are handed out. Lists of winners and even finalists should be handy guides for readers interested in finding great books and new authors. Is that actually the case, though? When all the excitement has died down and the statue is just one more thing collecting dust in the author’s office, do the awards make any difference to you as a reader?
Angie
No related posts.
Personally, I find reward lists are a great way to discover new authors to read. I also recall from my work with libraries (in a job prior to my writing life) that librarians use reward lists to make selections for their collections. At the end of the day I think winning rewards, especially a RITA or a Golden Heart, will influence some readers. And after long hours at a computer typing away, the recognition must be nice.
Nope.
Although my daughter, when she was as young as seven, would see the Newberry stamp on a book and refuse to touch it unless I read it first and assured her nobody’s dog, friend, or parent died because she had already come to associate award-winning children’s fiction with death.
I do skim the lists, generally, and might get a book from a library if the genre interests me but I’d never be influenced to buy a book based solely on the fact it had won an award. I’ve read some utter stinkers from the Bookers, Nebulas – and I’m still scratching my head of “Kavalier and Clay”’s Pulitzer.
Genre-specific awards are meaningful to me sometimes. When past experience has shown that I can trust the judgment of the voting body (this works well for the Hugos, not so well for the Ritas), I’ll at least give the book a second chance if I see that it’s a winner or finalist.
In fact, the only label on a book that will get me to actively avoid it is the phrase “Oprah’s Book Club.”
Awards mentioned on the cover definately don’t make me want to buy a book, because I don’t know enough about all these different awards to care. But then I’m like that with movies and music – I don’t care if something won an Oscar/Grammy/painted monkey, I just want a ripping good story and to be entertained for a while.
Except, like WriteBlack, for anything that even mentions Oprah in it. To me that means it’s going to be completely depressing, one way or another, and to avoid buying it.
Yes, they make a difference to me.
As an eBook reader, I will read an Eppie winner over a non-Eppie winner. Sure, the book may end up not being my cup of tea but at least I am assured it will be well written and have something ‘different’ distinguishing it from the others.
And I will always reco an Eppie winner as a ’safe’ bet, especially in categories I don’t normally read. My buddy Ciara Gold won an Eppie for A Noble Sacrifice in the Sci Fi/Fantasy Romance category. I don’t normally read Sci Fi/Fantasy romance but when people ask for a book in that category, I feel confident reco’ing A Noble Sacrifice.
Here in the UK, we have two major awards for romance, one for category length, which I was fortunate to win in 2007 with Marrying Max, and one for longer length fiction. By coincidence the long list of finalists was revealed today for the Romance award – http://www.rna-uk.org/index.php?page=article&id=155
I’m sure winning the award drew people’s attention to my work and Marrying Max sold out on it’s UK print run and is currently available in e book format from Samhain Publishing.
I write for two small press publishers. One targets the library market. Libraries (for the most part–broad generalization here) look at reviews over awards. Some won’t touch a book if it doesn’t get reviewed by the “Big Four”.
I enter my books in contests more to counteract the severe lack of distriubtion. I figure if I can get a dozen people to read my books, maybe word of mouth will step in. I’ve hit the finalist list in almost every contest I entered, but never a ‘winner’ — those honors went to the “Big Name” authors, and deservedlly so. I get personal satisfaction seeing my name on a list with theirs. I definitely add the award status to my web site, but I doubt it’s a factor in sales.
I’m only ‘borderline’ influenced by award winners. I’ve judged some of those contests, and I can’t say that the books I would enjoy reading necessarily come out on top.
For me, word of mouth, blurbs, and at least a few pages to judge the writing are far more influential than ‘award winning’ on the cover.
I’m also an Oprah-phobe.
I’m feeling a little sorry for Oprah. I’ve enjoyed some of her selections tremendously. Others not so much.
Sadly, I’ve not found industry awards to be a reliable indicator of pleasurable reading.
In the back of Stephen’s King’s On Writing he included a list of books he’s enjoyed. On the strength of several titles we have in common I’m sampling from his selections that I’ve not read.
she had already come to associate award-winning children’s fiction with death
Kerry, how funny. How horrible. I totally relate.
For me, finalist & winner lists aren’t a deciding factor, but they can be another “touch” to remind me to buy a particular book.
A book winning an award will not make me buy a book, or even make me pick up a book. I’ve had too many bad experiences with award winning books being completely unreadable.
I use lists to pique my interest in books but I can’t say it ultimately makes a difference in my buying habits. I use the lists of “What I’m Reading” by people whose opinions I respect and have in common more than I do award-winners.
That said, I have a friend who loves science fiction and has read pretty much the entire catalog of the heavy hitters in the genre. So now he’s going through the Hugo Award winners of recent years, working his way back.
“Do awards influence your purchases?”
No. Nor do blurbs by other authors. All that stuff is just cover-clutter to me.
Sarah — that’s interesting about the libraries; I hadn’t thought of that side of it. [nod]
Kerry — LOL! about death in the Newberry winners. [grin] I’m trying to remember which ones I read when I was a kid…. I remember some fun ones — William Pene DuBois was pretty awesome, and L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time of course, but I was introduced to those authors through teachers. I’m sure they chose those books because they were Newberry winners, but I have a vague memory of the school librarian trying to turn me on to Newberry books when I was like seven or eight, and most of them sounding kind of boring. Maybe a bit too literary for my tastes at the time? I don’t remember many deaths, though; maybe it’s a newer fad in higher-end children’s literature. [wry smile]
Erastes — I’ve picked up some award winners I couldn’t finish too. [nod]
WriteBlack — I’ll usually give the Hugo winners a looking-over too. I remember reading through Asimov’s Hugo Winners anthologies when I was a teenager; there’s some great stuff in there. A few I didn’t care for, too, but not as many as in a regular anthology that size.
I’ll admit I’ve never gone looking for an Oprah recommendation either. I don’t watch talk shows, though, so I’ve never really gotten into her in general.
Natasha — I think we all want great stories. [nod] The trick is sorting them out of the avalanche of books (movies, TV shows, whichever) presented each year. [rueful smile]
Kimber — that makes sense, that if you’re usually happy with the winners of a certain award, to use it as a rec list for friends. [nod]
Angie
In romance? Maybe. But it’s only one factor for me; I also look at reviews and excerpts (these tell me A LOT about an author’s voice, and are most often the deciding factor for me).
In other genres? Absolutely not. At this stage of my life, I’m a happy-ending kind of girl, and like Kerry Allen’s daughter, I’ve learned to associate anything outside of the romance genre that wins an award with someone somewhere dying tragically and horribly. Ugh. If I want stories like that, I’ll read the news.
Nell — congrats on winning and selling out your print run both! That’s great!
Terry — that’s a very down-to-earth approach. I agree, just getting your name out there over and over and over is a big help, even if you don’t win.
Evanne — Stephen King is a bit weird for me [grin] but that’s a good idea, finding out what your favorite author reads and giving his or her favorites a try.
Jessa — right, the “touch” is what influences me too, I think. Even if I don’t generally read winners of a particular award, just hearing about a book or an author over and over can make me at least pick up one of their books if I see it in a bookstore, and give the blurb and excerpt a chance to catch my interest. That seems to be what it comes down to, getting your name or your book’s title into a reader’s head so that when they’re browsing you’ve got that bit of a leg up.
Reader — that does happen unfortunately. :/ Sometimes it’s just a matter of differing taste or philosophy.
Jess — another vote for the Hugos, then, even if by proxy.
From a writer’s point of view, though, even that bit of piqued interest as you look down a list can be a significant advantage. One of the main problems is just how to be noticed out of all the thousands of other books published in your genre.
RfP — I can think of a few things I’d just as soon they left off covers too. [nod]
Angie
I admit that a few years ago (before I became a novelist) I set out to read all the novels that had won a Pulitzer in the last 30 years. I guess I just wanted to think of myself as “well read.”
I didn’t like all of them although, it must be said, I probably liked a higher percentage of them than if I’d picked up the same number of books at random.
I write popular fiction. I like to say that it is never my goal to have you notice my words. It is instead my goal to have you NOT notice when the phone rings.
Sometimes, with prizewinning books, I get both–a book that will keep me up to all hours reading it AND a that has an occasional paragraph that I have to reread and say “Damn, I wish I wrote that!”
And here’s a list of “must reads” –
Clifton Fadiman lead the New Yorker’s book review section in 933-1943; prior to it he was a chief editor of Simon & Schuster His Lifetime Reading Plan was first published in 1960. In the year of his death, 1999, it came back into print as The New Lifetime Reading Plan.
In The Beginning
Homer. The Iliad.
Homer. The Odyssey.
Herodotus. The Histories.
Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War.
Plato. The Republic, Selected Works.
Aristotle. Ethics; Politics, Poetics.
Aeschylus. The Oresteia.
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone.
Euripides. Alcestis; Medea; Hipploytus; Trojan Women; Electra; Bacchae.
Lucretius. Of the Nature of Things.
Virgil. The Aeneid.
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations.
The Middle Ages
Augustine, Saint. Confessions.
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales.
Plays
Shakespeare, William. Complete Works.
Molière. Selected Plays.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. Part 1
Ibsen, Henrik. Selected Plays. Doll’s House
Shaw, George Bernard. Selcted Plays and Prefaces.
Chekhov, Anton. Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; The Cherry Orchard.
O’Neill, Eugene. Mourning Becomes Electra; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day’s Journey
into Night.
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot; Endgame; Krapp’s Last Tape.
Watson, E. Bradlee and Benfield Pressey. Contemporary Drama
Narratives
Bunyan, John. Pilgrim’s Progress.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels; A Modest Proposal; Meditations upon a
Broomstick; Resolutions when I Come to be Old.
Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy.
Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice; Emma.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair.
Dickens, Charles. Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Bleak House; Great
Expectations; Hard Times; Our Mutual Friend; Little Dorrit.
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the
Looking-Glass.
Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure.
Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo.
Forster, E, M,. A Passage to India.
Joyce, James. Ulysses.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; Orlando; The Waves.
Lawrence, D. H.. Sons and Lovers; Women in Love.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World; Collected Essays.
Orwell, George. Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain.
Kafka, Franz. The Trial; The Castle; Selected Short Stories.
Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Voltaire. Candide and Other Works.
Stendhal. The Red and the Black.
Balzac, Honoré de. Père Goriot; Eugénie Grandet.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary.
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past.
Malraux, André. Man’s Fate.
Camus, Albert. The Plague; The Stranger.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Short Stories and Other Works.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter; Selcted Tales.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick; Bartleby the Scrivener.
Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn.
James, Henry. The Ambassadors.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying.
Hemingway, Ernest. Short Stories.
Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March; Herzog; Humboldt’s Gift.
Saavedra, Miguel de Cervantes de. Don Quixote.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths Dreamtigers.
Márquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of
Cholera.
Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich. Dead Souls.
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich. Fathers and Sons.
Dostoevsky, Feodor Mikhailovich. Crime and Punishment; The Brothers
Karamazov.
Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich. War and Peace.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak, Memory.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich. The First Circle; Cancer Ward.
Philosophy, Psychology, Politics, Essays
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan.
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty.
Engels, Karl Marx and Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spake Zarathustra; Selected Other
Works.
Freud, Sigmund. Selected Works.
Macchiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince.
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de. Selected Essays.
Descartes, René. Discourse on Method.
Pascal, Blaise. Thoughts (Pensées).
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Works.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; Civil Disobedience.
James, William. The Principles of Psychology; Pragmatism and Four Essays from
The Meaning of Truth; The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Dewey, John. Human Nature and Conduct.
Santayana, George. Skepticism and Animal Faith; Selected Other Works.
Poetry
Donne, John. Selected Works.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost; Lycidas; On the Morning of Christ’s
Nativity; Sonnets; Areopagitica.
Blake, William. Selected Works.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude; Selected Shorter Poems; Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads, 1800.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Ancient Mariner; Christabel; Kubla Khan;
Biographia Literaria; Writings on Shakespeare.
Yeats, William Butler. Collected Poems; Collected Plays; The
Autobiography.
Eliot, T. S.. Collected Poems, Collected Plays.
Whitman, Walt. Selected Poems; Democratic Vistas; Preface to the first
issue of Leaves of Grass (1855); A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads.
Frost, Robert. Collected Poems.
Poets of the English Language, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes
Pearson.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann and
Robert O’Clair.
History, Biography, Autobiography
Basic Documents in American History, edited by Richard B. Morris
The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Confessions.
Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson.
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams.
Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the
Age of Philip II; Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century.
Annex
McNeill, William H.. The Rise of the West
Durant, Will and Ariel. The Story of Civilization.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Oxford History of the American People
Smith, Page. A People’s History of the United States.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World.
Whitehead, Alfred North. An Introduction to Mathematics.
Gombrich. The Story of Art.
Adler, Mortimer J.. How to Read a Book
Terry, my biggest complaint with this list of “must-reads”–and with the Canon in general–is that it’s a very limited perspective (and this is still a bone of contention in many English grad programs).
Other than a handful of semi-canonical women writers from the 19th century, this list is sorely lacking in perspectives that are non-Western, non-white, non-male…
I agree, Kacie — I can’t say that I’ve read more than a handful on this list — I just passed on what someone on a “literary” list sent to me. I think Huck Finn is the only book on the list I can say I truly enjoyed, and I read it when I was about 10 (the first time, and then got a whole new slant when we read it in World Lit in High School).
Terry, I had to read many of these as an undergrad and in grad school, but was appalled that no one ever asked me to read War and Peace because it was “too long”! I spent one summer reading it on my own and absolutely loved it–but I still haven’t decided if it was because the novel was that good or because there was no professor to help me analyze all of the pleasure out of it…and I’m a college English professor now, too!
Toni — I like to say that it is never my goal to have you notice my words. It is instead my goal to have you NOT notice when the phone rings.
That’s pretty awesome, actually. I’d definitely sign that.
And yeah, if people occasionally notice my words too, (in a positive way, of course [cough]) I can live with that.
Terry — whoa! Thanks.
I got a similar list from one of my college English teachers. For a while I was hilighting the ones I’d read; I might even have it around somewhere.
Kacie — you’re right, of course. [nod] I like lists like this, though, because you can dump them all into a master list, with other lists of literature by women or people of color or gay people or whatever other little-represented groups you can find lists for, and then have a huge pile of Theoretically Good Or At Least Seminal stuff to read.
Terry — that’s funny; Huckleberry Finn is one of the few of Twains works I wasn’t able to get through. [wry smile] Tom Sawyer was good, I read that a few times as a kid, but it is a kids’ book. When I’m in a Twain mood these days, I prefer his short stories. I think my favorite is “The Jumping Frog,” especially in an edition which has all three versions back-to-back-to-back.
Kacie — I’ve never tried War and Peace, actually. Common wisdom is that it’s pretty awful as well as being long, and is only read because it’s one of those classics One Should Read. If it’s actually good, though, I might give it a shot some day. [scribbles note]
Angie
Awards don’t really make me more likely to buy a book. The only time it really comes into play is if I was wavering back and forth between two books that sound equally good, and one has won an award. I will SOMETIMES then be swayed enough to choose it over the other one, figuring it’s less likely that a CRAPPY book would win an award. But sometimes I pick the other way around because I figure there are a ton of great books and great writers out there that don’t have recognition because they don’t have the readership to GET the awards, so if I’m feeling adventurous, I’ll buy the one without the award. I tend to go for the underdog.
One award that I’ve found to be pretty consistently worth noting is the Newberry medal for children’s literature. I’ve never been let down by a Newberry winner, and if I see a children’s book that has it while shopping, then yes, I’m more likely to stop and read the blurb and consider buying it. Some other books I’ve read that had won OTHER awards were not all that great and made me wonder who voted and if they had any sense.
But Newberries seem uniformly good.
Bodhi — I’m sure everyone whose book has never won an award is grateful.
About the Newberries, that makes sense. [nod] I have some awards I trust more than others too.
Angie