6 ms·
Book prizes don't work how you think
- culi 3mo agoPretty 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
- vova_hn2 3mo ago> it's just like 5 people doing most of it I understand that finding technical/mathematical solutions to social problems is usually pointless, but still... What if we have, like, a lot of reviewers. Each reviewer gets n books randomly assigned to them. n is picked in a way that allows each reviewer to thoroughly read each of them without dropping it in the middle for bullshit reasons. Each reviewer ranks n books assigned to them, then we use an Elo-like algorithm to produce the final ratings and pick a winner. This would eliminate most of the randomness/unfairness described in the article. Of course, reviewers wouldn't like it, because it would significantly reduce their power and people never give it away willingly.
- vintermann 3mo agoAggregating preferences isn't easy. Are you sure you wouldn't get a book which is agreeable to almost anyone but not particularly exciting? This might work for e.g awards for the most important non fiction book, but for fiction, I'd rather try a book someone is excited about.
- Cpoll 3mo agoLe Guin refused a Nebula, and I think those are selected by member voting.
- fsckboy 2mo agofrom Le Guin and then Stanisław Lem's wiki pages: Le Guin refused a Nebula Award for "The Diary of the Rose" by withdrawing the nomination in protest of the Science Fiction Writers of America's revocation of Stanisław Lem's membership. Le Guin attributed the revocation to Lem's criticism of American science fiction and willingness to live in the Eastern Bloc, and said she felt reluctant to receive an award "for a story about political intolerance from a group that had just displayed political intolerance" toward communism.[11][12] She withdrew the novelette shortly before the announcement of the winners. The SFWA pleaded her not to do that since she had in fact won, but Le Guin insisted on the withdrawal. Lem was awarded an honorary membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) in 1973. SFWA honorary membership is given to people who do not meet the publishing criteria for joining the regular membership, but who would be welcomed as members had their work appeared in the qualifying English-language publications. Lem never had a high opinion of American science fiction, describing it as ill-thought-out, poorly written, and interested more in making money than in ideas or new literary forms.[42] After his eventual American publication, when he became eligible for regular membership, his honorary membership was rescinded. This formal action was interpreted by some SFWA members as a rebuke for his stance,[43] and it seems that Lem interpreted it as such. Lem was invited to stay on with the organization with a regular membership, but he declined.[44] After many members (including Ursula K. Le Guin, who quit her membership and then refused the Nebula Award for Best Novelette for The Diary of the Rose)[45][46] protested against Lem's treatment by the SFWA, a member offered to pay his dues. Lem never accepted the offer.[42][44] further interesting tidbits from Lem's page: Lem singled out only one[47] American science fiction writer for praise, Philip K. Dick, in a 1984 English-language anthology of his critical essays, Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Lem had initially held a low opinion of Philip K. Dick (as he did for the bulk of American science fiction) and would later say that this was due to a limited familiarity with Dick's work, since Western literature was hard to come by in the Polish People's Republic. Dick alleged that Stanisław Lem was probably a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion, and wrote a letter to the FBI to that effect.[48] There were several attempts to explain Dick's act. Lem was responsible for the Polish translation of Dick's work Ubik in 1972, and when Dick felt monetarily short-changed by the publisher, he held Lem personally responsible (see Microworlds).[49][48] Also it was suggested that Dick was under the influence of strong medications, including opioids, and may have experienced a "slight disconnect from reality" some time before writing the letter.[48] A "defensive patriotism" of Dick against Lem's attacks on American science fiction may have played some role as well.[48] Lem would later mention Dick in his monograph Science Fiction and Futurology.
- charcircuit 3mo ago>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.
- sssilver 3mo agoI feel like LLMs are not quite equipped to answer "is this wonderful and delightful" yet.
- neponeko 3mo agoYou should meet literary agents. An LLM is not as good as a skilled human who has already committed to giving your work a fair read. It is far superior to the quality of read you will ever get from a literary agent unless your parents are Manhattan old money.
- zeroonetwothree 3mo agoI guess if you want the most average book to win
- pfdietz 3mo agoThe book was rejected because it doesn't say "load-bearing" and "now here's the thing" enough.
- neponeko 3mo ago[dead]
- bariumbitmap 3mo agoWith comments like these I genuinely can't tell if it's a joke or not.
- apparent 3mo agoI think the last thing most authors would want is to have their book fed into an LLM, word for word, right when it's just come out.
- boznz 3mo agoGood post which basically states the f*cking obvious about how any "prize" or "winner" of any subjective category works.
- ofalkaed 3mo agoRelated 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-pulitzer-fiction-jury-what-really-happened-this-year https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/letter-from-the-...
- m463 3mo agoSorry, 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
- sanswork 3mo agoI remember drooling over zip disks when I was a kid. By the time I had enough of my own money to buy one they were clearly not the best choice anymore but I still did for the same reason around the same time I bought a stack of old sparcstations off ebay.
- auto 3mo agoIt’s funny, I had the same experience, and my stepdad told me recently that they close to buying me one, and eventually decided to just do a full upgrade of our machine instead. I’m definitely thankful we got a brand new machine instead.
- epihelix 3mo agoI briefly used Zip drives back in the day. They were amazing, when the only alternative portable media was a 3.5" floppy. And then USB thumb drives came along, and made them obsolete pretty much overnight.
- ColdStream 3mo agoAlso had a lot less worries about a random bad sector turning up with USB.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoAmazing, until you got the "click of death"
- code_duck 3mo ago
- gowld 3mo agoI read the article. Book Prizes Do Work How I Think. It's just like, someone's opinion, man.
- imzadi 3mo agoI'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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- atlasunshrugged 3mo agoDo you have any recommendations on which screenwriting contests are worth submitting to for a first-time historical fiction screenwriter? I've previously published a nonfiction book and am familiar with that side of things but am brand new to the screenwriting world and there are far more film festivals and competitions than I expected (and almost all seem to charge a submission fee)
- imzadi 3mo agoIt's been a while, but Austin, Nicholl, Slamdance and Page are the main ones that I'd recommend. Smaller ones that include coverage might be worth it sometimes just to get the feedback. Get involved with some screenwriting communities and see which ones people are talking about the most.
- atlasunshrugged 3mo agoOkay awesome, a friend recommended Slamdance too so I'm glad to hear some confirmation there!
- TeaVMFan 3mo agoAs an indie author (https://frequal.com/novels 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.
- aardvark179 3mo agoI don’t mean this to sound harsh, but this post comes across a little like you already assume you deserve to win such a prize and it’s just those fickle judges standing in your way. I looked at your sample chapter and immediately bounced off a police officer in Maine calling in a murder as a 187 (California penal code).
- stevenwoo 3mo agoThis matches what was lampooned in Erasure(2001) by Percival Everett and adapted into the movie American Fiction.
- neponeko 3mo agoWhat 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.
- shermantanktop 3mo agoThis all sounds informed and authoritative. And it’s believable. But can I ask how you came to these conclusions? Did you attempt this? Do you know authors getting 500k every two years?
- 3mo ago
- ungreased0675 3mo agoIt sounds quite arbitrary and subjective, even if the judges believe they’re following a process.
- ishanr 3mo agoEverything 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.
- yoz-y 3mo agoI love ebooks and audiobooks. But the fact that I can’t legally lend or sell them (same with steam btw) means that it’s at best a lateral step.
- kccqzy 3mo agoLending or selling ebooks necessarily requires DRM. A large part of the community thinks having DRM is way worse than not being able to lend or sell.
- WolfeReader 3mo agoSelling books doesn't require DRM at all. I buy DRM-free books all the time. As an example: Kobo will tell you, at the bottom of each book's page, if it has DRM or not. And it will happily sell you a book without DRM and let you download it.
- themadturk 3mo ago"Selling" doesn't require DRM; publishers require DRM. So not every book you want to buy or can buy is available without DRM. Not even authors especially want DRM. Kobo will only let you buy a book without DRM if the publisher makes it available that way.
- WolfeReader 3mo agoIf you say "publishers require DRM" and then say that publishers sometimes sell books without DRM, you might need to review the definition of the word "require". Some publishers require DRM. Which is entirely different than the false claim made earlier that "selling ebooks necessarily requires DRM".
- fumeux_fume 3mo agoExcept 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.
- dundarious 3mo agoYes, as someone who has read the literature section of the (small) national newspaper with some regularity, this is pretty much all old news -- could glean most of this from reading for a year. You hear about the longlists and shortlists and panel of judges (after the winner(s) is chosen), and one would hope that at least the literary prizes are highly subjective.
- vintermann 3mo agoHow could they not? There's no objective way to declare a book great (although there may be some objective ways of declaring a book bad).
- kubb 3mo agoWHY are we capitalizing RANDOM words within MULTIPLE paragraphs?
- xboxnolifes 3mo agoThey didn't.
- dahart 3mo agoFor emphasis? That’s your takeaway?
- deepsun 3mo agoTL;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.
- tacostakohashi 3mo agoRight, one could make pretty much the same observations about how hiring / promotion decisions are made, how investment decisions are made, and probably any number of other things that people like to pretend are objective/scientific but are actually just a matter of opinion.
- crackercrews 3mo agoI 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-writer/ https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-vanishing-white-male-...
- deanputney 3mo agoNeither part of that quote mentions a quota for the longlists. Am I missing something?
- crackercrews 3mo agoIt does not explicitly admit it, and seeing the quotes pulled separately make it harder to infer. But it's pretty clear when read in context that she's admitting that diversity is being factored into the longlists (which of course play a huge role in which books eventually win). Are these quotas or just nudges? It's hard to say. But I've been in the room when decisions like this were made, by institutions that are legally barred from even considering race. But in reality, race wasn't just part of the decision, it was determinative.
- arjie 3mo agoHaha, 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 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).
- TurdF3rguson 3mo agoAgreed on Murderbot, it's a fun read but there's no big new ideas there and that's what Hugo used to be about.
- arjie 3mo agoThat's exactly how I feel, but perhaps as others point out, I have simply tinted my glasses rose.
- zeroonetwothree 3mo agoThe Hugo awards have had a lot of weak winners in the past as well. For example: They’d Rather Be Right, The Wanderer, Stand on Zanzibar (some people might disagree), Harry Potter, Hominids, etc And have had many winning books that are enjoyable without “big ideas” as well. In the end it’s just a fan voted award and subject to marketing and politics. Judged awards are perhaps a bit more consistent in reflecting quality? (Though maybe not) And not every year gives us a Dune or A Fire Upon the Deep :)
- arjie 3mo agoHaha, Hominids! That was definitely one where I was left thinking "Oh that's it?" haha. Fair point fair point. I do think Harry Potter is like the Murderbot series. And to be clear, I really enjoyed Harry Potter when I was young. Can still recall getting the book at my maternal grandparents' place as a present.
- jancsika 3mo ago> 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.
- itchingsphynx 3mo agoThis sounds similar to submissions for national science grants.
- eviks 3mo agoSeems 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?
- koliber 3mo agoWhen you are judging something you are judging the whole thing. If the first part is bad that puts the book behind every other book. Even if the rest was decent the chance of it being the best overall is small. Think about judging a 3 course meal. If the appetizer is bad, what is the chance that you will rate this meal as the best even if the main course and dessert were very good? If you are eating at restaurants that are supposedly great, the chance is tiny.
- eviks 3mo ago> you are judging the whole thing That's literally the opposite of what happens, you can't judge the whole thing if you've only read 1 paragraph! > If the first part is bad that puts the book behind every other book. That makes no sense, you don't know the quality of other books to make that determination! What if they have much worse paragraphs in the middle? What's so special about the first one expect being helpful to the lazy judges? > Think about judging a 3 course meal. Don't, you just add more irrelevance her
- koliber 3mo agoIn theory, you're right. But she talks about how it happens in practice. We can all sit around and talk about how this or that should work in theory, until one day we get a chance to do that one thing. And then most of us shut up because the real world is messy. > What if they have much worse paragraphs in the middle? Do you think a book that has a particularly bad first few pages is more or less likely to have a lot of poor content in the middle vs. a book that has a really good first few pages?
- wodenokoto 3mo agoI’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)
- echoangle 3mo ago> 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.
- mapleoin 3mo agoI 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.
- aardvark179 3mo agoI think that proposed prize would be pretty “value-free.”