Book Awards: An End to Magical Thinking?

Nonfiction, and the Impact of Awards

Three years ago in November, I was writing here at Writer Unboxed about how this time of year is “the publishing-award equivalent of what zodiacal scholars sometimes call the ‘Mercury storm.’ At this time each year, a multitude of awards programs, national and international, reach their winner announcements.” And that has only intensified since 2020, with new awards and the clamor for coverage rising.

There’s a new development here, however, and I wanted to share it with you because it might begin to boost the value of key prizes if it’s adopted by the organizers of more award programs.

You may have been aware that the Booker Prize Foundation in London – which annually produces both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the International Booker Prize for a translated work – has begun to report to the news media the market impact its top honor can have on a book’s unit sales. After an interval of some weeks, the program begins to lay out to such details.

As an example, the 2022 Booker Prize for Fiction winner, Sri Lankan-born Shehan Karunatilaka, who won for his The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, had a threefold increase in media coverage when longlisted for the Booker. That level of coverage then tripled again, the Booker reported, when the book was shortlisted.

“With the announcement that it was the Booker Prize winner,” the foundation says, “sales soared to more than 100,000 across all formats. It now has been translated into 19 languages with another 10 [rights sales and/or translations] in process. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida has massively outsold—by 2,000 percent—Karunatilaka’s previously acclaimed and prizewinning novel, Chinaman (Penguin Random House / Jonathan Cape, 2012).”

This kind of information is seriously helpful.

While the majority of book- and publishing-award coverage that we at Publishing Perspectives in our international purview is based in the United Kingdom, the general trend everywhere is to accept awards attention as helpful to sales – but normally without publicly demonstrated evidence of this. The lure of the “golden sticker” is clear, of course. In a bookstore setting and online, the ubiquitous sticker on a book cover is believed to grab the eye of a consumer who may be swayed to buy that stickered book over one without evidence of such honors.

In fact, however, until the advent of the Booker’s information on its £50,000 prize winners’ unit sales, press runs, rights sales, and news-media attention, the market value of awards was actually something many if not most of us took as evident.

Proof in Another Pudding

Operating alongside the major fiction awards like the Booker’s program are, of course, major nonfiction prizes as well. And last week, there was a breakthrough in that arena: the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize in nonfiction’s newly undertaken market-impact reporting.

As we reported, the program worked with Nielsen to get a look at the four weeks prior to and after the naming of its top award. And this was done for six years of its winners. The picture, it turns out, is very promising.

The winner of its 2023 award, also just named last week, is the American Canadian author John Vaillant for his Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, which was released on May 23 in the United Kingdom by Sceptre, a division of Hachette UK’s Hodder & Stoughton. In the United States and Canada, the book is published by Penguin Random House’s Knopf, and was released on June 6. Based on the data that Nielsen was able to develop with the Baillie Gifford program, Vaillant’s book could be in line for an increase in unit print sales of more than 850 percent in the UK alone.

The data in this case pertains only to print editions, not to ebooks or audiobooks, and to the British “home market,” not to exports. So more sales energy, in fact, can be expected to accrue to the this and other Baillie Gifford-honored books.

It should be noted, too, that the £25,000 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, also nonfiction, has begun researching its honor’s effects on market activity for a book. And it would be great to see the United States’ National Book Awards – just named for 2023 on Wednesday, as we reported from New York – work on assessing and reporting some of that program’s market impact.

I should be clear here: None of this interest in market impact is meant to say that the winner of a given book or publishing prize isn’t deserving.

In the many instances we cover from so many parts of the world, these programs’ jurors certainly appear to work earnestly to select the best of the content presented to them. Submission criteria and processes vary enormously from program to program, from country to country, from genre to genre, and so on. Similarly, some awards programs are handsomely sponsored and run with expert guidance at their helms while others, of course, are much smaller affairs.

But the assumption that a longlisting, a shortlisting, or a win would improve the sales picture for any book graced by a golden sticker has – until these good moves being made among prominent awards in the UK – been something everyone was asked to take largely on faith.

And what’s being demonstrated so far is good news. Even in the case of the British Academy – which so far has had time only to assess some of the data available for its 2022 winner – the program’s organizers saw its 2022 winner, the Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán’s When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold, a book translated by Sophie Hughes and published by the independent house And Other Stories, capture as sales uplift of 132 percent. More details are anticipated from this program for its newly announced 2023 winner, the University of Oxford’s Nandini Das for her Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury, March 16).

Is there a chance that an awards program working to sort out its impact may get less happy news than these prize regimes have uncovered so far? Yes, sure. If anything, however, that could be taken as a signal that more energy and effort needed to go into marketing of the award. As we wrote in our announcement of the Baillie Gifford’s new effort, “The big awards programs, of course, are in competition with each other—for sponsorship, certainly; for the attention of publishers and authors; for the eyeballs of consumers (which encourage the sponsors, publishers, and authors); and for coverage from various news media, needed to communicate to those constituents.”

From the journalist’s viewpoint, this trend is good news. We like to be able to quantify impact. And surely a winning author and publisher, editor and translator, poet and illustrator, deserves to have the biggest effect in the marketplace an award program can provide. The more genuinely deserving the content may be, the more the imperative to get it across to the consumer. And the real gold behind that sticker may be in the cash register on online shopping cart.

I’d like to know what you think. In some cases, there are so many award programs operating in a given market that consumers may have trouble distinguishing them. Perhaps regular revelations of how much these honors can mean in the marketplace could help. What’s more, the process of participating in awards can be expensive and time-consuming for publishers and for authors: an understanding of what sort of market mojo a given prize has might help validate the expense. But then again, you may have a different take on this. Let me know, and thanks for reading.