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Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Using Awards List as a RA Tool: Locus Awards Edition

Over the weekend, one of my favorite awards was given out, The Locus Awards. Because these awards cover all of the speculative genres, they are a great example of one of my most popular blog mantras-- Awards lists are one of your best RA and Collection Development tools. 

 Click here to see every time I have talked about this and here for the first time.  

 In fact, it has been a while since I posted those initial reasons and I don't trust you all to click [I was a grad school teacher for 8 years, so I know a thing or two about how to make people learn], so here is a reprint from 2011:

 As the book award season heats up with the Nobel Prize in Literature being announced yesterday (disappointing from an RA perspective again) and the National Book Award coming early next month, the National Book Foundation got in the spirit by releasing their "5 under 35" list of authors to keep an eye on.
From the RA standpoint, this list of young authors can serve you in multiple spheres of your work:
  1. Collection Development: these are authors you need to be purchasing for your collections.  Go check your catalogs, and order copies where necessary. Also, keep an eye out for their new titles in the future.
  2. Readalikes: these authors make a great readalike suggestion for your readers who are interested in the newest literary fiction.  So while the waiting list for The Night Circus, The Art of Fielding, and State of Wonder may be long right now, these 5 authors under 35 are a great while you wait readalike suggestion.
  3. Displays: going back and checking past 5 under 35 designees  (scroll a bit; all of the lists are in the right gutter) and the also popular New Yorker 20 Under 40 annual list, makes for a unique and fun display idea.  These lists contain a nice mix of authors who made it big and those who never quite broke through, but all are quality options which your library probably already owns. Highlight that backlist by drawing a connection to the release of this new list.
  4. Resources: just being aware of designations such as this one provides you with a new resource for helping readers.  Don't forget about any and all award lists as a potential tool to help you as you match readers with their next good read.  If an author your reader likes has been singled out for an award in the past, there is a good chance he or she might enjoy the work of another author who also received this recognition.  I speak from personal experience here as I have noticed my own personal predilection for Booker nominees.
I hope this gets you to look at all award announcements in a different light.  Yes, it is good to know who the current award winners are, but do not forget to use this information as another tool in your work as the matchmaker creating connections between your readers and the stacks of books at your library.
Okay back to the awards at hand. Nowhere, and I mean nowhere, will you find a better list of all of the the best titles in SF, Fantasy and Horror, including short fiction and nonfiction, than Locus. From their Annual Recommened Reading List to these awards [which are based off of that previous list], this is the very best of speculative fiction for the general reader. Or, as I like to say, all of the titles and authors you need to have for your general library collections.

And I put my money where my mouth is on this issue, as I am currently in the final stages as the "captain" of the Speculative Fiction section of the new edition of the ARRT Popular Fiction Reading List, a product we sell to NoveList. We used the last three years of the Locus Reading List as one of our major resources to make sure we did not leave out the best and most important authors in these genres today.

Even if you are not a fan of speculative fiction yourself, and especially if you have a small library and a modest collections budget, take a look at these nominees and winners. What you will realize is that many of these titles [nominees and winners] you own already; seriously, check right now. Many of these titles are popular with your readers already. Therefore, adding a few more is probably a good idea. These are sure bet speculative titles for your collections.

Now go forth and make displays, order a few more titles, hand sell the Locus Award books and stories to readers today.

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The Locus Science Fiction Foundation announced the winners of the 2019 Locus Awards during the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle WA, June 29, 2019.
SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL
FANTASY NOVEL
HORROR NOVEL
YOUNG ADULT NOVEL
FIRST NOVEL
NOVELLA
NOVELETTE
SHORT STORY
ANTHOLOGY
COLLECTION
MAGAZINE
  • WINNER: Tor.com
  • Analog
  • Asimov’s
  • Beneath Ceaseless Skies
  • Clarkesworld
  • F&SF
  • Fireside
  • Lightspeed
  • Strange Horizons
  • Uncanny
PUBLISHER
  • WINNER: Tor
  • Angry Robot
  • Baen
  • DAW
  • Gollancz
  • Orbit
  • Saga
  • Small Beer
  • Subterranean
  • Tachyon
EDITOR
  • WINNER: Gardner Dozois
  • John Joseph Adams
  • Neil Clarke
  • Ellen Datlow
  • C.C. Finlay
  • Jonathan Strahan
  • Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
  • Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
  • Sheila Williams
  • Navah Wolfe
ARTIST
  • WINNER: Charles Vess
  • Kinuko Y. Craft
  • Galen Dara
  • Julie Dillon
  • Leo & Diane Dillon
  • Bob Eggleton
  • Victo Ngai
  • John Picacio
  • Shaun Tan
  • Michael Whelan
NON-FICTION
ART BOOK
SPECIAL AWARD 2019: COMMUNITY OUTREACH & DEVELOPMENT
  • WINNER: Mary Anne Mohanraj
The Locus Awards, except for the Special Award, are chosen by a survey of readers in an open online poll.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great post! I am a huge fan of Locus as well and refer to it when I am updating the speculative fiction RA materials in my library system as well. Very exciting that there will be a new edition of the ARRT list soon? When will it be published and available on Novelist?

July 4, 2019 at 12:51 PM

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