Book Awards
Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the amount of book awards that are given each year. There are so many that are obviously important, but what do you do with that information? Are they REALLY important? For my paper I focused on the negatives of book awards, the positives, and how libraries can incorporate book award winners into their programming.
People (I) would think that receiving a book award would encourage more people to purchase more books? Not always the case! Because most of the books that have received awards have been out for months and gaining notoriety throughout the year. By the time the awards are given, the excitement from the general public has waned, therefore doesn't translate into book sales. Also, once the book awards are given, more people are willing to give it negative reviews. While this opposes the argument that book sales don't increase (they could have already purchased the book before it won the award or borrowed it), more people have read the book by the time the awards are given, so there tend to be more negative reviews.
However, there are many wonderful things that come out of book awards. You are more likely to read out of your comfort zone, discover new authors or genres, and even find stand out books within your favorite genre due to the plethora of awards that are given.
As far as using these awards in programming and reader's advisory, you can go from simple book displays or book lists to incorporating them into larger events such as book clubs, bringing in speakers, or having a mock awards event.
What an interesting topic! Gee, I'd love to read the whole paper. :) For my own reading, I don't really pay attention to awards. I think most readers aren't really aware of all the different awards that exist and so they wouldn't know to seek them out. Possible exceptions would be Newbery and Caldecott winners since those are promoted a lot. As a librarian, however, I use awards lists A LOT. These really help me to know which books are real quality as opposed to just another book. I know that there are many gems that are overlooked, and awards lists can't include all deserving works, but on the other hand the awards are unlikely to include UNdeserving works, so they're a pretty good bet for the library collection. Also, I think award winners get more marketing attention from the publishers so I had assumed they'd get more popular - I like the way you turned that assumption on its head, revealing the possibility that the popularity drove the award/attention/sales instead. Very interesting - I'll be watching my own library teen patrons to see if the patterns you identified show up here as well. Thanks for a unique topic!
ReplyDeleteGreat summary Jennifer! I agree with Deirdre, I'd like to read your whole paper. Your point about books winning awards not always correlating with book sales is interesting, I never thought about those issues before. I usually like to see which books won awards for the year and then add them to my Goodreads account. :)
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