Awards Season
The Internal Dialogue & the Horse Latitudes
Monday, September 18, 6 PM, I’ll be Kathleen B. Jones’ conversation partner—her debut novel Cities of Women was published 9/5—at Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica, 1113 Montana Ave.
Still several spaces left in the online nonfiction & fiction workshop I’m teaching starting Oct. 3, for UCLA Extension (10 weeks, no class Thanksgiving week) - more info and registration at this link.
Subscriptions to Bookish 📗 are 15% off through 9/24 - founding member subscriptions come with a mystery package of goodies! (I will mail it to you - if you’re in the U.S. If you’re overseas, I will send you a snail mail note with some bookish jokes and literary quotes).
September is the unofficial beginning of book awards season, with the five long lists for the National Book Awards announced mid-month (2023’s were released this past week), the finalists about a month later, and the winners in mid-November at a stylish ceremony with a celebrity host who is often a self-professed book fiend. (You might have seen the news that Drew Barrymore was originally scheduled to host this year’s ceremony, but her invitation was rescinded after the talk show bearing her name restarted production, despite the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes).
It's a major coup to make the NBA long list, let alone the finalist list, and receiving the award is the authorial equivalent of winning an Oscar. The titles the publishers nominate are akin to elite racehorses—they’re sent off to compete in the Kentucky Derby of Books. (A possibly little-known fact: authors can’t submit their own books to the NBA—unless they are publishers who also publish other authors’ books. Publishers must pay the $135 fee—authors aren’t allowed to reimburse them for entry fees. This no-reimbursement rule came from an NBA administrator I corresponded with recentlly—it’s not specifically mentioned in the guidelines, however.) With other book prizes, including the Pulitzer, authors are permitted to submit their own books and pay any entry fees.
About ten years ago, I remember my now-erstwhile agent saying that only two book prizes really matter in Big Five publishing: the Pulitzers and the National Book Awards. It seemed to me a harsh pronouncement, but she’d been an agent for more than 25 years by then, and I knew not to doubt her.
She went on to explain that these prizes are the only two guaranteed to move the needle for a press. She was talking about sales, which in corporate publishing are the most important metric for measuring a book’s (and, increasingly, an author’s) value. Other awards such as the various PEN prizes, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Drue Heinz Prize, the Grace Paley Prize, are prestigious and coveted and help put a writer on the map critically (and are also good for securing academic jobs), but in most cases, they don’t result in a sales track that acts as an insurance policy for the publication of recipients’ future manuscripts (not beyond the second or third book, in most cases).
Having received several prizes for my first four books—among them AWP’s Grace Paley Prize, the Chicago Public Library 21st Century Award, the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, and an O. Henry Prize, I know first-hand my agent wasn’t spouting mean-spirited malarkey when she said the Pulitzer and the NBA are the brightest stars in the book-prize firmament.
As I wrote shortly after starting this Substack, I penned one book after another for eight years, and the three agents I worked with during that period weren’t able to sell any of them, despite their belief in these manuscripts’ value and my various literary prizes and good reviews (among them a NYTBR cover review). I eventually placed my three most recent books on my own with independent presses.
If you take a look below at the fiction long list for the NBA, you’ll note that my story collection (published in June), Direct Sunlight, is not on the list. (Shocker, right?! 🤪) Not that I had a snowball’s chance in Hades of winning, but I was disappointed when I learned my publisher wasn’t planning to submit it. My editor had been supportive, but the decision wasn’t hers to make (it was likely made by committee).
They were focusing on the “heavy hitters” in their poetry catalog, I was told. I don’t know which titles were submitted, but Yxta Maya Murray’s new novel God Went Like That (published this past March—she and I worked with the same editor) is one of the best books I’ve read this year (and last year and the year before last…)
I know I’m writing from a place of privilege—to have a book out at all is worthy of celebration. Let alone one that people you know (and some you don’t) will buy and read, and a few of these readers will send you notes to say they enjoyed it.
This is all a writer can reasonably expect.
So why are writers often unhappy post-publication? This is a question I’ve thought about a lot since I published my first book in 2010 and have discussed with other writers at length too.
If you’ve published books that didn’t immediately sprint to the top of the New York Times’ best seller list or receive major accolades and attention from many quarters, you likely know first-hand that each book’s publication comes with a set of expectations you can’t fully apprehend until after the book has been out for at least a few months. You see other writers receiving more reviews or selling more copies or reading in more bookstores or being nominated for prizes you weren’t nominated for or attending more literary festivals or appearing on national talk shows or hanging out backstage with Marky Mark at the Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch reunion concert or whatever it is…
There are a lot of ways to feel bad about oneself, to feel overlooked, ignored, undervalued, invisible, witless, and talentless.
This will probably sound anticlimactic, but I do think it’s true: every writer, no matter how famous and wealthy and celebrated (except maybe for Stephen King?)* feels disappointed in the scale and scope of their career at times.
Like it or not, we really are in this together.
Awards are great—if you win them. Otherwise, I know it’s wisest not to think about them much and to keep writing.
Lastly, I did convince my publisher to submit Direct Sunlight to a couple of other book prizes, and I submitted it to a few too. If you have a new book out this year, you can still submit it for the Pulitzer—through mid-October, I believe it is—or, better yet, your press can. 📗
*Even the mighty Stephen King probably dwells in the horse latitudes** once in a while.
**When the sea was becalmed for too long, sailors had to throw their equine passengers overboard to conserve the ship's potable water.
Prizes... It's so outrageous to me that as a Hebrew writer living in the US, I cannot enter any of the Israeli book prizes. They are only for Israeli residents. Hebrew has always been written and spoken outside Israel. This discrimination is so fascist! And you are one of the best writers I've ever read (and I read a lot!) in any language (OK, I only read two languages, but I read translated books too). I admire your writing. NBA, Pulitzer, you should be there!
Yes! Exactly!