We could suffer more book awards

I came across a video from Jared Henderson on an online sentiment that new books are not as good as the old ones. He touches on a few ideas on why he thinks this idea is going around. One of his points was discussing the sheer volume of books. Even if the increasing ISBN volume per year is misleading, it is still a large amount of words to read and we have a discovery problem.

Last month, Rebecca Makkai talked about how a lot of book prizes work. Which largely boils down to very human processes and real limitations of time, money, and technicalities. There’s a lot of gotchas for various scenarios where good books would get excluded. It seems books have a hard time getting into the correct prize consideration. Books are being submitted to prizes for contractual or they’re being entered into the pool just to see what happens regardless of relevance.

And while mostly irrelevant to this topic, this video from Man Carrying Thing in response to someone complaining about the recommended non-conservative books from her bookstore had interesting side point. He brings up is that literary prizes have been critized since the 80s for not being effective at awarding good books. The discovery problem is not even a new problem. These awards have been struggling to be effective¹ for a long time.

Solution: more book awards. Make more prizes focused on smaller scopes. The increase in writers who write books mean more to read. We cannot read them all, but human curation should be scaling with the content and we need mechanisms to share that are better than what we’ve been doing. Human curation would be more signal than the noisy algorithmic mechanisms that we’ve been attempting. Recommendation algorithms are not enough².

Make more niche awards. Make them hyper focused. Make local awards for things that people in your city enjoyed. Make a super specific isekai sub-genre award. Make a champion of champions award that only looks at winners of other awards and pits them against eachother. Make a champion of losers award for best book that got nominated but didn’t win any of the other awards. Make it easy for people to know the criteria. Make the judges provide a top X of older books that could’ve fit in this prize category (do they do this? feel like this alone would be great lists of books to read). No more best literary book of the year. That’s way too broad. I don’t even know what to expect if I were to read it. Where’s that best time-slip-to-1970s fiction award?

Distribute the slush pile.

(After writing this I tried to finally look up if there’s a good list of book awards. Best I found was bookawardsdb which seems like a great start! But I want more niche!)