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Vanity Book Awards Blasted
On the day before the National Book Awards were presented in Manhattan, Salon magazine's Laura Miller wrote about the growing attention to awards, especially in today's competitive market. Quoting James Wood's New York Magazine articlie that began with the statement, "Prizes are the new reviews," Miller speculates that readers might well use awards to decide which books to buy and read."There are some 400,000 titles published per year in the U.S. alone -- one new book every minute and a half -- according to Bowker, a company providing information services to the industry, and there are fewer people with the time and inclination to read them. If you only read, for example, about five novels per year (a near-heroic feat of literacy for the average American), you could limit yourself to just the winners of the NBA, the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle, the Booker Prize and then, oh, a Hugo or Edgar winner -- or even a backlist title by that year's Nobel Prize winner. You'd never have to lower your sights to anything unlaureled by a major award."
Miller tells how she at first confused the National Best Books 2009 Awards, conducted at the USA Book News website, with the NBA. She goes on to explain the large differences (such as 150 categories vs. 4) and dismisses the NBBA as a "vanity" book award, a "bogus award that will impress those friends and relatives who haven't heard of the National Book Awards in the first place and will perhaps even (briefly) deceive the few who have."
The NBBA awards and USA Book News strategy seems to be based on featuring bestsellers on their home page, and hoping would-be "award-winners" will be attracted to having their books associated with the blockbusters. Miller contacted Shel Israel, author of business bestseller Twitterville, (currently shown between Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and American Rebel, the new Clint Eastwood biography), who was clueless. "I have never heard of this site, was not asked; nor was I informed that my book was listed there."
See the entire article here.