An honor to be nominated by Eric Beetner

 Do you try to read the books that are nominated for major awards? Do you second-guess the nominations or do you usually find you agree? 

Well, this is prescient timing. It just so happens that I recently learned my novel, The Last Few Miles Of Road, has been nominated for an ITW award for Best Series Novel. It was a complete blindside shock to me and I’m extremely grateful.

It also makes it hard to let my cynical side free and admit that I don’t put a whole lot of weight behind an award nomination in my own choosing of what to read. I think it comes from years of being let down by award-nominated books that have turned out to be simply not for me. I know this is my issue much more than it is the nominated books. I tend to read far outside the mainstream.

I will say that there are certain awards I put more weight behind, ITW being one of them (and no, not because I’ve been nominated twice now) I find myself often at odds with the taste of the Edgar awards. Just not usually my kind of book. 

Another thing I take into consideration is how many times I have acted as a judge for awards, both big and small. Certain awards, like the Anthony’s for example, are open to anyone who is a Bouchercon attendee and therefore maybe more democratic, but at the same time it functions more as a popularity contest.

I’ve served as a judge and head judge for larger scale writing awards where the judge panel is 5-10 people strong and composed of other writers and industry professionals. It’s not fair to say one is more “legitimate” than another, but I do think a peer-voted category is a little more gratifying for the writer. When I saw my little indie press book pop up on a list with best sellers like David Baldacci and Meg Gardiner, I know that judges didn’t need to put a small press book on the list. Nobody owed me anything. My book got there on merit. In the list of 6 nominees in my category, one book has over 22 thousand Amazon reviews. The Last Few Miles Of Road has 42.

ITW isn’t getting any publicity from nominating a book like mine. Nobody is signing up for Thrillerfest to come see if I win or to get a chance to meet me in the signing room. 

So the question of if I “agree” with nominees… I truly think that’s not my business. I’ve been a judge, a head judge in fact, when not a single of my top picks have made it to the nominating stage. The other judges were so far from my choices that nothing I picked made it. We’re all different readers. Any kind of art thrives on different tastes. It’s why I get so annoyed when other lovers of hardboiled or noir fiction ever talk down to cozy writers, or erotica writers. No! There SHOULD be books and stories out there for everyone! I know the books I often seek out are for a small niche audience, of which I am a part. I’m so grateful they exist and I know how hard it is to break through the piles and piles of more conventional books, which then go on to get nominations, which then go on to get the associated publicity and resulting sales boost (though I have not yet seen mine, but I plan on flogging this accolade as far as it will take me)

I like award categories to get a niche as they can. I’ve long advocated for the Anthony awards to expand to many more categories. It doesn’t cost any extra. All it does is give more books a chance to get recognized and fight their way into someone’s vision when they come to the book table. Dig deep and have a Noir category, humorous, cozy, historical, debut, series, hardboiled, traditional, international, audiobook, book cover, and on and on.

So, yes, I like awards in concept. I don’t look to them very often to find what I will read next, but I do take them as an indicator of what the industry is responding to. I like to be aware of them and when I get a chance to read some award winner, I do so with an extra curiosity. Maybe also a little extra scrutiny, which sometimes backfires. I expect it to be great and if I don’t feel it is, I get a little soured on the entity that picked it. 

So it’s a complicated mix of feelings for me.

Right now, though, I’m very pro-awards books. I think you should read them. I think you should look at a category and see the outlier you hadn’t heard of before and seek that one out first. “If it’s good enough to be nominated alongside Ann Cleeves and Iris Johansen, it must be good!” That’s the idea, anyway.

Wish me luck in June. I’ll be there waiting to hear if the underdog can win one for all the little folks out there, or if it was truly just an honor to be nominated. But I don’t think I’ll be writing a speech ahead of time. I’ve lost more awards than most authors will ever be nominated for. Maybe I’m due. Maybe nobody owes me a damn thing. I do know it’s nice to be invited to the party. I treat it like the honor that it is, win or lose.