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Book prizes don't work how you think

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Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#71

Post by yoz-y »

kccqzy wrote: post #23
yoz-y wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

Lending 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.

And we mostly get neither. Some stores do offer drm free ebooks and audiobooks.

My comment was mostly about the “steam for books” being lauded better as physical books. To me it would only be strictly better if you could sell and lend (which you can’t on steam)

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#72

Post by mapleoin »

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.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#73

Post by aardvark179 »

mapleoin wrote: post #72

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…

I think that proposed prize would be pretty “value-free.”

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#74

Post by vintermann »

vova_hn2 wrote: post #65
culi wrote: post #2

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 G…

> 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 assi…

Aggregating 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.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#75

Post by aardvark179 »

TeaVMFan wrote: post #12

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.

I 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).

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#76

Post by vidarh »

crackercrews wrote: post #39

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…

No, she's pointing out that when you have a dierse prize committee, you end up with more diverse results.

> For example, apparently no white men born in the last 40 years have published literary fiction in the New Yorker. [1]

How many writers under 40 have published literary fiction in the New Yorker to start with? New Yorker skews heavily toward more experienced writers, and the average age of debuts for fiction writers is already mid to late 30's. The pool of experienced writers under 40 is small.

Couple that with the New Yorker publishing a very small number of writers in total, and white men making up a minority of the possible pool of writers (New Yorker does not publish only American writers), is it actually surprising if you can't find any in the small subset of writers in the New Yorker under 40 that happens to belong in one specific group?

The New Yorker does publish a lot of white male writers - to make this into a thing, the young white male published writer who loves to publish writings about how young white male writers don't get published had to specifically point to a publication that publishes few young writers in general.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#77

Post by vintermann »

arjie wrote: post #59
autarch wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love both the Murderbot books and Piranesi. I think they're excellent for _very_ different reasons. With Murderbot, the "corpos control everything" scifi future setting is nothing new. I think the brilliance is in its portrayal of the main character, primarily through its inner voice. Murderbot is a really unique character and it is written very well. Conversely, in Piranesi, the main character is basically a ciphe…

Hmm, the inner voice didn't feel particularly novel and had a young-adult feel to me, but ah well. Quibbling now. Apparently just a matter of taste.

Young Adult is a marketing term. It's a really terrible idea to leave classification to marketers.

As it is you've been given a way to respectably say "I'm more mature than you" and you've leapt at the opportunity, it seems.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#78

Post by watwut »

ishanr wrote: post #20

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.

> The real disruption of books haven't really happened.

Imo, this is one of the tech pathologies. The culture does not care about building and creating anymore, all it cares about is disrupting and destroying. Books were disrupted all right.

> I thought eBooks and digital books would get us there, but it simply hasn't changed anything.

Of course not. The culture of broad reading require people to show books they like to friends and share them. It requires culture building. Ebook devices are locked out, unnecessary expensive due to e-paper patent and an obstacle to any of that.

And it requires discovery. You used to pick a book and read several page at random places of your choice and then decide. Ebooks shop allows me to see a picture of the first page or some such.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#79

Post by watwut »

crackercrews wrote: post #42
deanputney wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither part of that quote mentions a quota for the longlists. Am I missing something?

It 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 le…

> But it's pretty clear when read in context that she's admitting that diversity is being factored into the longlists

First it is not pretty clear, what is clear that long list is not composed of white male only.

> (which of course play a huge role in which books eventually win).

And second, this really come across as hidden "we should not be competing with them anyway" argument. Yes, if long list contains other people then just white males, it makes it more likely for those other people win. It makes super huge role, sure, but that is not something nefarious.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#80

Post by vintermann »

fumeux_fume wrote: post #24

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.

How 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).
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