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Book prizes don't work how you think

122 points by samclemens

by culi

2 subcomments

Pretty interesting post. I guess I'm surprised that it's just like 5 people doing most of it and the most complex structure is still just 2 stages usually (Pulitzer: 5 judges send 3 books to a special council to pick a winner). It makes me think you probably get as much value from following a few specific critics as you would from following these prizes
I wonder how the reviewers feel when authors like Ursula K. Le Guin refuse awards

by imzadi

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I've read for screenwriting contests and it is pretty much the same thing. During the first round of reading, they usually expect you to read a minimum number of pages (usually 20 pages). Only one person will read your script during the first round, so if it doesn't catch their attention you will be cut. During the subsequent rounds you are generally expected to read the whole thing, but most of the worst stuff has already been eliminated. In some contests you can see the coverage from previous judges and some you can't. It all depends.

by ofalkaed

0 subcomment

Related read; a first hand account by one of the 2012 Pulitzer jury members giving a good account of the process and attempting to explain why no literature prize was awarded that year.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/letter-from-the-...

by m463

3 subcomments

Sorry, I laughed... :)
> I’ve judged prizes both pre-2020, when we were sent stacks of books, and post-2020, when everything had switched to zip drives and online databases.
Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 megabytes (MB), then 250 MB, and finally 750 MB. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

by arjie

3 subcomments

Haha, very interesting. I hadn't thought about the mechanics of it all but from the title I suspected it might be something like this. There's no objective measure after all of what a good book is. It's not bad for the process. The top few universally seem pretty good.
I have noticed that the Hugo Awards appear to have declined somewhat in quality. The Murderbot series is enjoyable, yes, but it's a winner just like Dune and I think that's odd. Perhaps it's my tastes that are changing or my tastes are stagnating and the world is evolving. Ah well.
Oh and, about the cronyism angle in literary prizes, I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Nobel_Prize_in_Literature is a good read. They picked members of their own academy that year and eventually one of the winners killed himself (perhaps over it).

by eviks

1 subcomments

Seems to work close to how I think, would be interesting to know what people actually think instead of relying on what the author thinks people think
> why on earth would I continue reading in the hopes that somehow this book will become magically brilliant, brilliant enough to make up for that paragraph and be the winner of this major award? I have 100 other books to get to. I am not a fast reader.
Because that's literally your literaly job?

by jancsika

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> In every prize I’ve ever judged or heard firsthand reports of, everything else is up to the judges and their idiosyncrasies.
Sure. But even seemingly broad guidelines deeply influence/constrain the judges' choices.
E.g., the Pulitzer was created when America was still insecure about its artistic output and stature compared to Europe. Judges of the music prize were consequently asked to choose from "music in its larger forms," meaning ambitious, large-scale symphonic or chamber works typically derived from conventional European forms/genres.
The problem is that 20th-century American musical innovation almost definitionally meant straying from those conventions. The most banal example: Conlon Nancarrow's complex tempo canons that required hand-punching rolls for the player piano. There's a hard limit to the thickness of a piano roll that necessarily limits the duration of any given piece.
Composers began making pilgrimages to Nancarrow's apartment in the 1970s just to hear his music. By 1982, he'd won the MacArthur Fellowship for his Player Piano Studies. Funny enough, that same year, octogenarian composer Roger Sessions-- a former teacher of Nancarrow-- won the Pulitzer. His piece? A concerto for orchestra.

by stevenwoo

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This matches what was lampooned in Erasure(2001) by Percival Everett and adapted into the movie American Fiction.

by ishanr

2 subcomments

Everything about the book publishing industry is antiquated.
I wish Amazon focused on books instead of ecommerce.
The real disruption of books haven't really happened.
I thought eBooks and digital books would get us there, but it simply hasn't changed anything.
The Steam (valve software) of books hasn't happened yet.

by TeaVMFan

1 subcomments

As an indie author (https://frequal.com/novels), this makes me glad I haven't submitted my novel yet to any of these contests. The chance that a submission fee could be wasted by chance (not a match for the reviewer's interest or mood that day) is just too great. It seems that the larger publishing houses are more willing to shell out on the chance to win this lottery, according to the article.

by mapleoin

1 subcomments

I think the most interesting point was that there are no (or very few) rules specific to each prize and that's it's mostly up to the idiosyncrasies of the unique small group of people who are part of the panel. So the prestige of a specific book prize is really superstition. It makes sense rationally, outside of having the same group of people judge the same book prize every year (and then they'd have to live forever?) there's no real way to keep consistent. And their tastes would I assume change from year to year. The other way would be to have a sort of constitution or set of rules, but that would be interpreted differently by each group.
I wonder if we'll have AI-judged book prizes in order to keep them more "value-free", you could have a group of authors write down a prompt file and then the AI could read hundreds of books in a day. But then there would be the implicit biases of the AI and I suppose most high-brow authors and readers would despise those particular biases.

by echoangle

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> Every year, speculation articles appear with people guessing winners (for the Pulitzer and National Book Award and Booker in particular) based on absolutely irrelevant factors like whether an entirely different jury liked this author’s last book five years ago, or whether this book was on other juries’ lists for other prizes. Any article that gets people talking about books is a great thing, but the speculation part is, I hate to say it, useless.
How is that irrelevant? I don’t think the idea is that the previous information causes the book to be chosen next, but it should be an indicator that the book is good.
Just like a student writing a good exam isn’t irrelevant when deciding the next grade, even though the good grade itself doesn’t cause another good grade. But it still influences the expectation.

by wodenokoto

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I’m a very casual reader, nothing heavier than Murakami.
My surprises:
- it’s just 5 judges, who makes the shortlist
- it’s the _same_ 5 judges judging the short list
- there are generally no criteria
- Pulitzer Prizes favors American settings.
- edit: bonus surprise I expected judges to be mostly critics and professors of literature
While I’m not surprised it’s just a few people judging the short list I would have expected more eyes on making the shortlist (editors and publishers make a short list and critics and authors judging it)
I definitely expected different prizes to value things differently. Like a Novel prize winner I would expect to be heavy, with layers and quite frankly a bit intimidating to casual readers, like myself.
I would not expect a criteria to favor a setting. Maybe an authors background (again, I would expect Nobel to favor poor authors who somehow made)

by neponeko

2 subcomments

What cronyism buys you is restarts. Having an enforcer can get you more than the 20 pages. You’ll be read to the end by every judge, and you may not get the award (these are competitive, and even most people with good enforcers aren’t great writers) but you’ll get a thought-out reason if it’s a rejection. You’ll know that everyone tried to find a yes because, while they were allowed to say no and eventually did, not taking you seriously would be bad for their careers and reputations. Only 0.01% of people have that kind of access, though, and you don’t write your way to getting those agents and publicists—you’re either born into it or you’re not. The rest of us poor loser fuckers get tossed at the first bump, which could be a minor copy error like a missing comma.
The truth about the literary world is that, while a lack of talent can impose a ceiling—no one gets book awards in fiction for being rich or famous if they can’t write at least as well as an above-average college grad—there is no level of talent that overcomes the lack of access, and it’s a kind of access you’re born into, to get a fair read from anyone who matters in the industry.
It’s all a scam and even most people who succeed spend more trying to fulfill the expectations of the published-novelist/public-intellectual role than they’ll ever get back from it in royalties or options or anything else. It’s an exhausting, dismal life in truth. The lifestyle costs of being someone who can get a $500,000 advance every two years run to… easily that rate.
If you actually want to write and have a decent life, you have three options:
1. Write genre and go back in time to the 1970s when getting a literary agent (as opposed to a schmagent who can’t get anyone to read anything) was possible.
2. Figure out the self-publishing game and get really, really good at it.
3. Take a job that has absolutely nothing to do with writing and accept that you’ll take three times as long to produce a book as a career author. Self-publish or work through university presses and don’t expect to be read by more than a few hundred people.
I don’t love Silicon Valley but if they had done something about publishing in the era of “disruption” I would have cheered it on.

by ungreased0675

2 subcomments

It sounds quite arbitrary and subjective, even if the judges believe they’re following a process.

by itchingsphynx

0 subcomment

This sounds similar to submissions for national science grants.

by fumeux_fume

2 subcomments

Except for the prize committees outsourcing roughly the same sets of judges, they work a lot like how you’d expect. The judges pickup a bunch of books and choose the ones they like the most. Since the author makes it clear how subjective the process truly is, you can assume that personal biases play a huge part in how winners are chosen.

by kubb

2 subcomments

WHY are we capitalizing RANDOM words within MULTIPLE paragraphs?

by gowld

0 subcomment

I read the article.
Book Prizes Do Work How I Think.
It's just like, someone's opinion, man.

by deepsun

1 subcomments

TL;DR: It's not fair. Just like every other competition. If you want to win, you ought to do not just better, but much better than others.

by crackercrews

2 subcomments

I think she's missing the point here. First she says:
> Every couple of years, someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about complains publicly that judging panels are picking books based on wokeness or diversity quotas or some other nonsense.
OK, so the judging panels are not picking books based on diversity quotas, cool. But then she admits that the longlists are subject to diversity quotas:
> It’s true that longlists don’t look like they used to. This might have to do with prize committees themselves finally diversifying, which means a broader variety of opinions and tastes. And it might have to do with all of us preferring books that, you know, do not sound like every other book we’ve read.
> It turns out that when we read broadly and fairly, it’s no longer true that 95% of prizes go to straight white men, go figure.
To be honest, I don't pay much attention to book prizes, but I'm well aware of claims that it's not just that "white men don't get 95% of prizes anymore" but rather that in some cases, white men are not included at all, despite making up a fairly large chunk of the population. For example, apparently no white men born in the last 40 years have published literary fiction in the New Yorker. [1]
Are there book prizes with similar track records? I don't know for sure, but I'd imagine that whoever is deciding on publishing at the New Yorker is probably pretty similar to the people handing out book awards.
1: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-vanishing-white-male-...

by charcircuit

5 subcomments

>1) Not every judge can look at every single book; and 2) When a judge realizes they don’t love a book, they can put it down.
There is room for LLMs to disrupt book judging by being able to read every single book.

by boznz

0 subcomment

Good post which basically states the f*cking obvious about how any "prize" or "winner" of any subjective category works.