Do Literary Awards Influence Book Buyers?

Because of our participation in promoting the shortlisted non-fiction books for the New Zealand book awards this year, I started wondering about the true influence of those little badges that appear on prize-winning books on us as shoppers and readers. 

Do major literary awards actually equal more demand for the books and make them more popular? 

The answer, as with so many things in life, appears to be “it depends.”

Interest in a title does go up after it wins a major award, especially for fiction and nonfiction, and the prominence of the award also plays a role.  But whether or not it actually increases sales of the book depends on how popular the title was before it won the award. 

For example, fiction and nonfiction winners of the Pulitzer Prize often appear on bestseller lists well before the awards are announced, so the impact on their sales is modest (or, more accurately, difficult to measure if they were already at the top of the lists). 

However, if a more unknown author or title wins, the book can see a huge jump in sales, as the award and subsequent publicity means that many more people hear about it and want to get their mitts on a copy. 

“And this is where I see the benefit of literary prizes,” says Amy Jones of Writers Digest. “If they’re well thought out and set up, literary competitions that play out over the course of many months with longlists, shortlists, and finally a winner will make use of those months to celebrate the authors they’ve chosen. To expose those authors to a wider readership that they might not get from being a mid-year, mid-list novel.”

Chef Monique Fiso wins the 2021 Ockham for Illustrated Non Fiction.

The Nobel prize for literature is a very famous prize but is known to generally only boost sales measurably in the author’s home country and the same is likely true the more local and nationally focused any award is. At “the coalface” of bookselling I can say that our own Ockham New Zealand Book Awards do make a small impact on demand, especially in the illustrated nonfiction category where the books are often purchased as a premium gift - those badges give buyers an extra assurance about their decision.

However, there could also be a dark side to winning a literary award. A study published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 2019 showed that "winning a prestigious prize in the literary world seems to go hand-in-hand with a particularly sharp reduction in ratings of perceived quality.”

The study’s authors compared book reviews on Goodreads for books that were shortlisted for awards, but did not win, and those that won. Award winners faced a torrent of negative reviews that their shortlisted contemporaries didn’t.

The authors suggest that the notoriety gained by winning an award increases the size of a book’s audience — but not necessarily because those people are actually interested in the topic of or style of the book. 

"The issue here is that readers assume that a book is 'good' because it won an award, but what is 'good' is partly a matter of individual taste,” one of the study’s authors told The Guardian. "As a result, readers who read prize-winning books tend to be disappointed – not because prize-winning books are bad [...] but rather because many readers who are drawn in by prize-winning books tend to have tastes that are simply not predisposed to liking the types of books that win prizes."

Alison Jones reading from her memoir ‘This Pakeha Life’, a book I would not have picked up if it weren’t for its Ockham long list status, but will definitely be a contender for my favourite book of 2021.

So… caveat emptor. Just because a book has been crowned “best” by a panel of experts doesn’t mean it will be your cup of tea. And that’s totally OK. 

But if exploring the longlist or shortlists of book awards help broaden your exposure to new titles and authors, then that can only be a good thing — whether you end up liking the book or not.