Does winning a book prize help sales?
This was part of a two-part question in a discussion thread on Linked In—the two questions were this one and whether Author Guild serves self-published authors. There are good discussions on this social media site about the book business, but I’m usually a lurker because the monitors often have obvious agendas I find annoying (many aren’t writers, of course, but PR reps and marketers, cruising for clients). I came out of the shadows for this thread and answered the person’s two questions with no and no.
From op-eds in this blog, readers know why I say no to the Author Guild question. They are first and foremost an org promoting traditional publishing and traditionally published authors—in other words, they feel threatened by indie writers and attack them and their favorite media, ebooks, whenever they can. They supported the Big Five and Apple in the agency-model price-fixing lawsuit launched by the Justice Department. They have launched repeated attacks against Amazon, recently in support of Hachette. They’ve let old has-beens like Patterson and Preston lead the charge against ebooks and indie writers. So enough for that question.
The other question can’t be answered because there’s a dearth of reliable stats (nothing about the Guild is reliable, of course, including the stats they pull out their you-know-whats). The genesis of my no can be found in the fact that almost every prize you can sign up for on your own is an award in a contest that’s merely a money-making scheme for the organizers of the contest, from the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Awards to the Writer’s Digest contests. I get invitations to submit all the time. They immediately go into the email trash bin on my computer or physical trash bin if they come via snail-mail.
I entered one contest with a short story back in the day only because it was basically free—I think I paid $5 to receive a file back with edits (that’s a lot cheaper than most editors, and much cheaper than most contests!). I won fifth place. Stupid me: Encouraged by this success, I was gullible enough to enter a few WD contests (Writer’s Digest) back in the day too, but I stopped when I made a quick analysis about how much money they make (maybe not anymore?). (By the way, I’m not renewing my WD subscription and won’t miss their spam AKA ads and newsletters.)
Many prizes are for literary fiction (the Hemingway Awards are an example—this genre is that pretentious catch-all one that rarely contains books I care to read) or non-fiction (I read more of those); the Nobel, Pulitzer, and Man Booker are “elite examples.” A fellow doubter (the monitors probably consider us trouble-makers) in the Linked In thread indicated an article in The Guardian (after the Snowden fiasco, I generally ignore this rag, which isn’t much better than a supermarket tabloid) from 10/16/13 that listed ten ways to win Man Booker; these serve equally well for the Nobel and Pulitzer and many others.
I’ll take the liberty of paraphrasing (so it applies to those other “prestigious awards” too): (1) Be old (but not quite dead?). (2) Be verbose (G recommends 374+ pages—they might actually look at stats). (3) Use a short and meaningless title (G recommends three words or less—I guess Gone Girl would work but not Fifty Shades of Grey?). (4) Go to a private school (Harvard or Yale, I suppose, for the U.S., but not MIT or Cal Tech—heaven forbid!). (5) Study in Oxford (isn’t that the same as #4? And why not Cambridge, if we’re very British?). (6) Be male (how ‘bout transgender?). (7) Write about death with maybe some love thrown in (i.e. ignore plot and be tres boring). (8) Make sure your name or pseudonym is simple (not too simple and certainly not foreign-sounding?). (9) Be traditionally published (of course!). (10) Wait for the money to roll in (?).
Note that The Guardian doesn’t exactly preclude genre fiction, but the stats speak for themselves. Conditions 1, 2, 4, and 7 just about disqualify genre fiction writers. I won’t say that all literary fiction winning one of these prizes is boring, but the likelihood’s high. I also won’t say that I haven’t read a book winning one of these prizes. I have on occasion (I read 100 Years of Solitude in Spanish BEFORE Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel—now there’s a long name for you, but it’s foreign!). I just generally consider “literary fiction” a category to put a book into when it’s boring (#7), you can’t figure out where to put it, and some famous old dude (#1) wrote it.
I guess #10 implies Man Booker helps book sales. So, if you follow The Guardian’s rules and write literary fiction, maybe one of these big prizes will help sales. Otherwise, my no answer is validated, at least indirectly. Stay away from contests. There are other ways to spend your money that actually might help your book find readers. But, if you’re gullible, and have extra money to spend (lucky you), enter a contest. There are many willing to take your money. And, if you win, it might give you an ego boost. That’s all you’ll get from it probably.
[Now available on Amazon: Family Affairs, #6 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series.”]
In elibris libertas….
