Using Awards Lists As A RA Tool: Explanation Edition

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool. 

Click here for the full interview

I am and have been a juror for the Bram Stoker Awards for many years, I understand how these awards work, and then this year, I also joined the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence Selection Committee [ACM] and have learned an entirely different way to select books for major prizes. I have also been contacted by colleagues who are on other major genre awards committees to discuss their processes and compare notes with the Bram Stoker Awards. 

And to top off this intro, as you all know from reading this blog [and quite literally from the top of this page], I am a HUGE fan of using awards lists as one of your best RA resources. 

While most literary awards post their committees and/or their rules on their websites, the nitty gritty details of exactly how titles are selected for different prizes is not easy to find, nor is it standard in any way. 

This is for one key reason. While no one involved with prize selection wants to be secretive, there is a level of confidentiality that matters in order to protect the integrity of the selection process. For example, when I read for the Stoker for Superior Achievement in a  First Novel for many years, unless I was paid to review that first novel I didn't mark that I read it anywhere-- not on Goodreads or my blog. I only discussed it with my jury during our emails and zoom meetings. For the ACMs, I have read dozens of books already and very few of them are on my Goodreads. I am dying to shout to the world about some of them though and I suspect after we announce the long lists, I will. For now, I have an old fashioned notebook to keep track of my thoughts for our monthly discussion meetings

But, as part of the leadership team for the HWA, right after this year's Bram Stoker Awards were announced, we wanted to be more actively transparent about how it all works and we asked Sadie Hartmann, Mother Horror, to help us via her LitReactor column. 

Our goal was not only to be transparent about our process because nothing they say in this interview is NOT already available publicly, but also, since the Stokers equally weigh jury opinion AND member recommendations to build their long lists, we also want to solicit more member involvement in making these choices.

From the open of the interview/article:

In order to gain some insight into The Bram Stoker Awards, I interviewed James Chambers, Administrative chair. I understand he consulted the other two chairs, Alex Hofelich, Co-Chair/Jury Coordinator; and Caroline Flarity, Co-Chair/Public Liaison, so they could collectively answer my questions. I'm so thankful for their time and willingness to participate. 

Again, click here to read it all.

Please read it. But I do have a few takeaways.

First, the Bram Stoker Awards are unique as the interview explains:

An important element of the Bram Stoker Awards that often gets lost in the shuffle is that, technically, no one “wins” a Bram Stoker Award. They receive a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement, and the award does not recognize the “best” work in a category, but a work that achieves something noteworthy. This distinction has been part of the awards since their founding. That one work receives an award over another does not equate to that work being “better” than the other. It means only that more members voted to recognize what that work achieved. This was part of the philosophy put in place by HWA founders such as Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, and Joe Lansdale, among others.

Second, every single member, no matter the level, can recommend a title to be considered for nomination. The article explains it in detail, but all you have to do is log in to the "members only" site, and right there, on the top of the page, is a big red button that says "Recommend a Work." You just click it and add the title.

However, despite the ease, we have found, as the interview states, those who complain the most about their favorite books not being on the Long Lists, when we go back and investigate, most of those people did not take the time to click a button and recommend that title.

As Hartmann writes about herself in the piece, when I finish something good, I go recommend it. I refrained from recommending any first novels for many years because I was on that jury, but now that I am off that jury, I have been recommending first novels at a higher rate than anything else. I will also say that as the Chair for First Novel, I would periodically check to see what First Novels were being recommended by members and if we did not have them in our jury selection submittable, I went out of my way to add them for our consideration.

Third, speaking of the Long List, and I can speak to this from years of experience, it is comprised of the top 5 choices from the jury [who submit a 10 book, in order of preference list] and up to 5 choices from the recommended list generated solely by members. As the former Chair of First Novel, I can tell you that every single year at least 2 [and sometimes more] titles have come off the bottom of our jury submitted top 10, replaced by titles in our category that got 5 or more recommendations from members. And in more than one instance, one of those titles has received the Stoker.

Fourth, authors cannot recommend their own title, BUT they can self submit to a jury. Again in my many years chairing First Novel, it was my job to solicit as many PDFs as possible for our jury Submittable, but with 75-90 titles being considered a year [just for that single category], over 75% were unsolicited by us. In other words, self submitted titles make up the bulk of our pool to consider. Every year we have had titles I have never heard about outside of my Submittable portal make the final ballot. All comers have been considered and acknowledged as worthy of consideration for the Stoker.

In my conversations with other people on award committees I am constantly getting praise for how the HWA handles things. I had no idea how fair and balanced we were compared to others. We have worked hard to balance the input from members vs juries. Is it perfect, no, the interview even notes that, but it is a close as any award can be. And I stand by that statement as someone who has served on serveral different award selection committees.

I wish every award was as transparent about how they select titles. I hope this post inspires them to be. I also hope it helps some other writer association prizes to make their awards process more streamlined. I know a few are straining under the weight of having one jury do every single category, which is just....well exhausting to think about. Just handling First Novel was a lot for me to manage and I was the Chair so I had to also wrangle everyone else. I cannot imagine having to also read for the other 12 Stoker categories.

These are my thoughts, but read the piece by Hartmann. It is fascinating and has a lot more detail from those who do the heavy lifting. But I also hope that this post makes you, the library worker, poke around the websites of awards when I post them, to investigate how they choose their "winners." It will help you to more accurately use them as a resource. You can use the links at the top of this post to help you learn more about that.