Award Season Continues: Barnes & Noble Discover Prize
Barnes & Noble has announced its Discover prizes, with the top fiction prize going to Gin Phillips’ The Well and the Mine (Hawthorn Books); second prize to Benjamin Taylor’s The Book of Getting Even (Steerforth Press) and third prize to Zachary Lazar’s Sway (Little, Brown) Top nonfiction prize went to David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); second prize to Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss (Grand Central Publishing); and third prize to Nia Wyn’s Blue Sky July (Penguin Group USA).
I’m always interested in books that get awards, and at least look at them when I’m in the bookstore. I don’t know, though, whether this particular award from B&N has ever swayed me to buy a book. It may have, I just can’t recall.
For a genuinely interesting discussion of awards, from the Barnes & Noble Discover to the Nobel Prize, check out Sara Nelson’s “Do Book Awards Really Matter?” in the Book Beast section of online news aggregator The Daily Beast. It’s fascinating to consider how much (or little) the book awards affect an author’s sales, and which awards garner what kind of news coverage. Nelson has an informed perspective on this: she’s the former editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, and the author of So Many Books, So Little Time.
If you haven’t visited Book Beast before, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s great to see books covered with passion, erudition and, at times, tongue planted firmly in cheek.