[I apologise in advance for the lack of schmancy fancy graphs or illustrations.  But I’ll bold all the important stuff.]

UNIQUE

So like I said in the introductory post I read the shortlists of 22 genre and literary awards.  At the time I thought this was an insane thing to do given I’ve struggled to read 100 books per year.  What I was banking on was that there’d be overlap between awards, a duplication of critically acclaimed novels.

And that’s precisely what happened.

Overall, 154 novels were nominated.  Of these 101 novels were genre and 53 books were literary.  The doubling of genre novel versus literary novel is partly because I read more genre shortlists but mostly because (a) I read the four novel categories for the Locus Awards (amounting to 22 books) and (b) the John Campbell Memorial Award nominates 17 finalists.

The important point is that of these 154 novels 108 of them were unique, that is the novel only appeared once across the 22 shortlists.

But while the multiple appearance of the novel makes my life easier (in terms of the number of books I need to read) it does reduce the number of voices being heard.  I think we want some duplication – the best books, like Ali Smith’s How To Be Both which was nominated five times (across the 14/15 literary season) deserve to be recognised and promoted.  But too much duplication and it feels like that either we’ve run out of ideas or more critically the gatekeepers (those who choose the best books in any given year) are growing increasingly conservative in their choices.  And when we see the same three or four novels crop up in the Nebula / Hugo / World Fantasy award shortlists, we (or maybe it’s just me) despair about the lack of variety.

Anywho we know there were 108 unique novels (which is unique-rate of 70%).  But when we split it between genre and literary we see a genuine divide.

Genre – 101 novels / 62 unique / 61% [this is from 12 awards shortlists]

Literary – 53 novels / 46 unique / 87% [this is from 10 awards shortlists]

If we remove both the Locus and John Campbell Memorial Awards from contention the results are better:

Genre – 62 novels / 45 unique / 73%

There’s one more thing I should do and that’s look at the Literary Awards from September 2014 to August 2015.  In other words a season that starts with the nomination of the Man Booker shortlist and ends with the novels chosen for the Bailey Prize.  In many respects this is a fairer comparison than simply looking at the Literary award nominations over a calendar year.  The reason for this is because while genre awards always look backwards – i.e. always look at the works published in the previous year, some Literary awards, like the Man Book and the National Book Award, look at the novels published in the year of the award.  They can do this because the judges are given ARCs, galleys etc of books that have yet to be published.  As a result, the Literary awards that are announced earlier in the year, like the Folio Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award are feeding off the same books that the Man Booker or National Book Awards considered the year before.

Confused?

Don’t worry.  The point is if we consider the literary books nominated between September 2014 and August 2015 we get this result:

Literary – 53 novels / 39 unique / 74% 

Which is near identical to the results generated by Genre when we remove the Locus and John Campbell Memorial Award:

Genre – 62 novels / 45 unique / 73%

Literary – 53 novels / 39 unique / 74% 

My conclusion, for what it’s worth, is that the Locus and JCM are so large in quantum and so different to anything in the literary world that you need to remove them to make a fair comparison.  And that comparison shows us that both Genre and Literary are nominating a fair amount of unique novels.  Or more to the point the balance seems right in terms of promoting the best books in a given year – the books that everyone loved – and profiling an array of different voices.

THE PAGE AND WORD COUNT

It will be a surprise to no-one that genre novels are longer than literary novels:

Genre – 363 pages / 106,000 words

Literary – 319 pages / 92,033 words

Someone better at maths can work out the standard deviation and the variance (happy to provide the figures).  But based on gut instinct and a quick scan of the figures there’s a greater consistency in novel length when it comes to genre than when compared to literary novels.  I doubt I’m going to win many prizes making that observation.

So that’s Part One complete.  Next Part – Gender and Diversity!