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The Hugo Awards and Collection Development

I am a reader and a librarian, and I read all kinds of things, including a lot of science fiction and fantasy. I am not a fannish type, I just really love to read.  I am not a professional genre writer, so I watch genre writers’ organizations like SFWA and HWA from the sidelines, and I haven’t been to a convention in years. The politics of how awards like the Hugo and the Stoker are chosen haven’t been something I have been very focused on. For two years here we reviewed as many of the Stokers as we could, focusing on the quality of the writing. I have to trust that the writers with the opportunity to nominate and vote do that, too.

I haven’t seen much said about the current controversy over the Hugos in the library community, with the exception of a short article in Library Journal, with commentary from their regular columnist describing it (I’m paraphrasing) as a backlash against diversity in winning works. I would say that in the fan and author community a great many people view it this way– as a step back from representing the variety there really can be in genre fiction. If I’m wrong and there’s lots of fabulous writing out there on the effects this has on librarians and readers, tell me, please.

I can’t see how an award like the Hugo could be completely nonpolitical. Most people would like an award, and it’s reasonable for people to promote their own work or books they really like (George R.R. Martin promoted Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, for instance) However, nominating people to make a point, whatever that point is, does a disservice to librarians and readers, because most librarians choose books for their collections choose popular works already, but they also spend their limited dollars on books that have won prominent literary awards, believing that the awards are legitimate representations of the best of the best in their particular genre. See, here’s the collection development website EarlyWord. Scroll down and look along the right side column. There, under Best Books and Best Sellers is a list of awards. Oh, my goodness, there are so many. Do you think a busy collection development librarian is going to follow the politics of every single award? I think it’s reasonable to say that librarians and readers who DON’T attend WorldCon and DON’T follow the shenanigans of every writerly organization should be able to look at these titles and authors, knowing that they have been awarded because they are legitimately the best representations of the genre, given the criteria for receiving the award. That’s what people think they’re getting, and if they’re going to spend their money and time on a book, then they deserve respect, even if they didn’t shell out $40 to vote.

It makes me happy to learn about an author who has risen to the top because of the excellence of his or her work. But it frustrates me to no end to find that the choices were the result of an ideological battle. A controversy like this destroys a tool that all SF/F writers have available to them to promote their genre and their work.

Posted on April 10, 2015 by , Reply

Halloween Books, Continued

Lucy, a librarian who read my last post, pointed me to another list of new and not-so-scary books to share at storytime by Nora Rawlinson at EarlyWord, a collection development and readers advisory blog that collects reviews, bestseller lists, and much more in one place. Very nice! These are also mostly current books, although she also listed a couple of her own favorites. It was fun to see Pamela Jane’s Little Goblins Ten on her list- a very cute book that we just received here- and a brand new easy reader. The lack of “scary” easy readers is a frustration of mine. There’s nothing wrong with Biscuit or Henry and Mudge– these are both series a lot of kids love-, but some kids just aren’t motivated by the typical easy readers. They want the spooky stuff. I’ve noticed a few more titles like this recently, and am glad to see that this is changing.

In other news, I was pointed toward a blog called A Book-lovers’ Review, which is holding a contest that looks like a lot of fun, if you like either YA or adult paranormal fiction. It’s called “Trick or Treat Spook-tacular”, and there is a giveaway of a selection of titles, many of them signed, every day until October 31. In the interests of full disclosure, I haven’t encountered this one before and don’t know much about it. According to the reviewer, she includes information about content in her reviews, which could be useful, but this is definitely not a professional review site. Still, the contest looks really cool! I wish I knew how she managed to collect all these signed books, because I’d love to do this kind of giveway for you all right here!!

Enjoy!

Posted on October 17, 2011 by , Reply

Why boycott HarperCollins?

Well, I’m late to the party with this news, but better late then never. HarperCollins has instituted a new policy of selling ebooks to libraries. After 26 checkouts, an ebook license will expire and a new license for the same book will have to be purchased. HarperCollins apparently came up with the number 26 because that would be equal to a year’s worth of two-week checkouts. Maybe in some places, books get used up and thrown out after 26 uses, but in my personal experience, unless it’s seriously damaged or out of date, I put it back together the best you can and put it back out on the shelf. The school library I worked in had a great budget for a school its size, but I could have been paying for two licenses or even three for the most popular titles, at the rate that kids checked in and out. That would have left a lot of holes in the offerings I could make, both in fiction and in nonfiction. So… there are a lot of librarians, readers, and even authors, who are vocally unhappy about this. Some are going so far as to boycott HarperCollins. This is actually quite a job, since HarperCollins owns many, many imprints.

Now, I get that publishers are in it to make money, and they see library checkouts as lost sales. With individual purchases of ebooks, you basically have one reader=one book. It’s simple to see the impact on sales. But libraries are a different matter. Libraries lend. There, you have many readers who can read the same book (which they are reading instead of buying) so publishers see those as lost sales (even though the library user might go out and buy the book afterwards if she likes it enough to want to read it 26 times).

The result of the idea that libraries get in the way of sales means that it is really difficult to get ebooks from the library. If you have a Kindle, you’re out of luck- Kindle books can’t be lent by libraries. If there’s an author you like who’s published by Macmillan- well, they don’t sell ebooks to the library market at all. It is, however, an incredibly wrongheaded idea. Libraries create and enable readers, and those are the people who are using Kindles, Nooks, and the other various ereaders out there. Nonreaders don’t use ereaders, It’s time for publishers to wake up and see that libraries are the ones creating their customers.

Libraries already face stringent budget cuts. Many are struggling for survival. This isn’t a library-friendly policy. But I question whether it’s really a good idea to boycott HarperCollins. Their imprints serve some pretty big groups of readers- romance readers, children’s books- and for a library to boycott HarperCollins (and some are even pulling print titles as well) denies something that every librarian knows is vitally important- and that’s accessibility to their community. It makes me really angry that HarperCollins is pulling this, limiting access to ebook titles , and obviously changes have to be made in the relationships major ebook publishers have with libraries (here’s a very intelligent post at EarlyWord, “Towards a New Model of Ebook Circ in Libraries”). But a library boycott is not the answer. However, you personally can make a difference by boycotting HarperCollins ebooks and by writing the CEO at HarperCollins on the behalf of libraries and ebook users (maybe you are one) with the aim of doing what we try to do here at MonsterLibrarian, which is to connect people with books, in whatever form they take.

Posted on March 4, 2011 by , Reply