EIMEAR MCBRIDE, an Irish writer, did not expect her first novel, “A Girl is a Half-formed Thing”, to be a runaway success. After being rejected by publishers for nine years, her manuscript was finally printed by a small publishing house in a run of 1,000 copies in 2013. But when the novel won a series of book prizes everything “got out of control”, she says. It has now sold 80,000 copies, and Ms McBride’s quiet existence has become much busier. “It sort of ruined my personal life for 18 months,” she laughs.
Book prizes are proliferating. This year over 300 will be handed out in Britain alone, according to Jonathan Ruppin of Foyles, a small chain of bookshops in London. More seem to appear each year, he says; small prizes, for experimental fiction or short stories, have blossomed.
Publishers rely more heavily than ever on these awards as a way to get books noticed. Partly this is because the way that people get recommendations has changed: there are fewer erudite booksellers on the high street, and newspaper column inches given over to literary critics have shrunk. Prizes are also important in a market which is bursting with choice: each year around 180,000 books are published in Britain. Most first novels “just disappear”, says Dan Franklin, the publishing director of Jonathan Cape. For some books, being shortlisted is the “only way to...Continue reading
via Brian Rushton, All must have prizes
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