Prizes – is the literary world upside down?
I’ve submitted a manuscript for a literary prize competition, one that only accepts as-yet unpublished work. Long-listing takes place in a couple of months. I haven’t crossed my fingers. Doing so makes writing on the computer keyboard rather difficult.
It’s no secret that getting books – any books, but especially “literary fiction” (I’ll come back to that) – published in the “traditional”, old-fashioned way is difficult. The writer is often thrilled even to get a rejection letter. At least someone has read something of the work.
Prizes can be a way to break away from the electronic slush pile that accumulates on the hard drives of literary agents who report, routinely, that your book doesn’t “fit.” But unlike the competition I entered, most prizes come for works that have already found not just a home, but one occupied by an editor and marketing department willing to undertake the hard work of nominating a work for a prize. A good book may find a publisher and then languish on the publishers’ physical slush pile – books waiting to be pulped. Then a prize comes along and suddenly, you’re a great writer.
While waiting to be called to collect my prize (fat chance!), I came across another lament, this one, however, with a call to action. Writing in “Persuasion,” a newsletter-cum-community on Substack, Sam Kahn tossed this Molotov cocktail into the demonstration of rioting writers outside the citadel of global publishing. “Writers, Abandon Literary Prizes,” he shouted, a virtual shout in the deafening silence of Substackery. He wrote:
As I got older and developed a more mature understanding of what literature is, the prizes started to seem increasingly bizarre and then sort of embarrassing. Literature isn’t really like sports. It comes out of people’s souls and speaks to people’s highest truths. Giving out a prize for novels is a bit like a priest taking Sunday confession from the whole congregation and then giving out awards to the best ones.
A National Book Award, a Booker, a Pulitzer, a Nobel Prize can do wonders for an author and maybe, maybe just, convince publishers that it’s still worth losing money on a bunch of other books in the hopes that one piece of overtly literary writing justifies the salaries of the remaining few editors of serious fiction, not to mention the literary agents and all the freelancers who support them by agreeing to read for close to nothing monetary.
Kahn continues:
The real argument for prizes isn’t about their merit—everybody does know at some level that they’re kind of silly—it’s that the industry needs them, that sales of high-end fiction would plummet without them. But that strikes me as a very food-scarce way of thinking.
What distresses Kahn is that it’s not just the publishers that seek books that might win prizes, but that authors try to write the sorts of books that have won prizes. In essence, the “Prize” shouldn’t be the prize – the source of value. The work itself is what we should prize.
Still, I’ll eagerly await the announcement of the longlist in a couple of months. Once rejected (again), I’ll satisfy myself that my work itself is worth prizing.
NB: Literary fiction is sometimes called “anything that isn’t genre,” (see Nordberg, 2021, on categories). “Genre” here means crime, romance, sci-fi, historical, fantasy, and similar subcategories, which is certainly not what Northrop Frye (2000 [1957]) called genre. Giving your book the label “literary” puts you straight onto the fast lane – to the slush pile.
Frye, N. (2000 [1957]). Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Nordberg, D. (2021). Category Choice in Creative Writing. New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 18(3), 330-345. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2020.1855200 or https://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/34858/1/Nordberg%20CategoryChoiceInCreativeWriting%202020%20accepted.pdf
Donald, I understand and largely concur with your concerns about the notion of competitive prizes mixing in with the process of publishing--or agreeing to publish--worthy books, particularly "literary" fiction. But, the fact is, many high quality, small, independent literary presses, including many university presses, only publish literary fiction by running annual competitions, in which perhaps a small handful of titles "win" publication. One of these will win a fiction "prize" named for the publisher, and several others will "win" an almost as marketable "runner up" status. It may seem like a lot of spade work just to publish a good novel, but it is incredibly difficult to "sell" the readership market on a good novel. Thus, I am largely sanguine about the gymnastics by which many legitimate publishers will take on quality fiction. That there is clearly competition going on in this establishment should be unremarkable, since the industry itself runs on a process very similar to a sweepstakes runoff. Publishers don't operate prize competitions in order to separate good manuscripts from bad ones. They do it to decide which of some number of excellent and promising manuscripts they can take a chance on. I'll add that prizes and competitions are perhaps the least concerning bits of "nonsense" we find in seeking to publish good books. Perhaps my favorite of these bits of nonsense is the one about starry-eyed authors being obsessed with the "victory" of publication without paying for it. Here too, I understand the impulse. But the publishing industry is not innocent of wanting to make a buck. When an author assigns his/her inherent rights to publish a work, easily 90% and sometimes more of the costs and profits derived from "monetizing" those author rights are vacuumed up by the publisher--charging his costs of production, marketing and distribution against the rights which the author has "sold"--and by the major book distributors. And of course, there is also the book seller [stores and online sales] taking a share of the author's profits. Left with a royalty of perhaps 5% to 10%, some part of which his agent will want, one might reasonably ask exactly who paid to underwrite this vastly inefficient market process? I hope you get some good news ultimately from the competition you've entered. Cheers.
I never seen writing fiction as an Olympic sport.
We all know prizes are fixed.
When I started out some decades ago I was asked to submit work because I would win. I decided that was a step too far down the primrose path. I’m simply glad I made that decision then. I’d do the same now.
If I was in this game to make money I’d have decided to be an estate agent.
So be it.
Time rebalances most things.