#Goodreads awards

[unlimitedsupplies]

it's that time of year again

[blumoonfiction-blog]

The Goodreads 2024 Readers' Choice Awards: Adding to My TBR!

As a bibliophile, the Goodreads Readers’ Choice Awards are like a second holiday season. Every year, these awards showcase some of the most celebrated books, as chosen by the massive Goodreads community. For 2024, I had my eye on specific categories: Historical Fiction, Mystery & Thriller, Fantasy, Horror, and History & Biography. While the winners are noteworthy, some of the runners-up and…

[rhosynviteri]

Looks like Goodreads heard readers when it came to diversity because this year is certainly better in that department.

[loverslibraries]

the way horror and fantasy are the only two genres i can vote in for the goodreads awards... ANYWAYS I VOTED

[jessequinones]

Goodreads Doesn't Care About Literacy

I didn’t mentioned this last time but the Goodreads Book Awards for 2023 has done something which I think is kind of strange, there’s no best children's book this year… in fact, there’s a lot of things they didn’t add. This article was going to be about why you shouldn’t ignore children’s literature but this is Goodread's shortest category selection of all time.

Let’s take a look at what we do have.

Fiction

Historical Fiction

Mystery & Thriller

Romance

Romansty (new category)

Fantasy

Science Fiction

Horror

YA Fantasy

YA Fiction

Debut Novel

Nonfiction

Memoir & Autobiography

History & Biography

Humour

Here’s what’s missing

Graphic Novels & Comics (2022)

Poetry (2022)

Middle-grade & Children (2022)

Science & Technology (2020)

Food & Cookbooks (2020)

Picture Books (2020)

Best of the Best (2018)

Business Book (2014)

Paranormal Fantasy (2013)

Travel & Outdoors (2011)

First thing first, the awards are all done online and there’s no trophy for the winner so why did they get rid of these categories? Is it because they weren’t popular? Who cares if the paranormal fantasy category doesn’t get a lot of votes compared to normal fantasy? There’s no physical trophy to create. Let the paranormal fantasy fans be able to vote for who they think is the best book of that year.

It seems to be there’s a limit for the top 20 categories for some reason, even though, I can't stress this enough. There’s no physical trophy, so there’s no reason to restrict yourself...Why does this year only have 15 categories compared to others which had 20?

If for some reason you have to have a max of 15 categories then it’ll be best to combine them. If Goodreads, doesn’t like this idea then they could add every category, there’s no reason why a virtual choice award needs to have a limit on the number of categories.

Instead of the best YA fantasy and fiction, make it the best YA book. Git rid of the Romantasy category, there’s already a romance section, just add fantasy romance books in that category. Fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction should be combined as well.

Instead of 15 categories, there are now 11 and plenty of room to add children's books, graphic novels, picture books, and poetry. I know there are going to be people reading this upset that I combine a few of these categories which is why I can’t understand for a virtual choice awards why they would restrict themselves. Science fiction and historical fiction fans are very different from each other and shouldn’t be in the same category but at the same time children's books, graphic novels and poetry shouldn’t be scrubbed from the list either.

Even categories that aren’t popular such as the food category have a reason to exist. I don’t know how to cook, and after discovering a cookbook that won best of the year, I might be willing to buy it. There you go, I just gave Amazon money because a cookbook was voted as the best one for that year.

Literacy is important, and there are several different kinds of literacy. Scrubbing the children’s section, graphic novels, and even poetry, one of the oldest forms of literacy is telling. It tells me Goodreads doesn’t care about literacy but instead, engagement to its website. Why else in the Romansty section that a single author could have...is that three different books in the same category? You mean to tell me out of the top 20 books, three of them came from the same author? Wait...hold on, out of 20 books to choose from, instead of 20 different authors you have 15 because if an author published multiple books within a year they get multiple chances to win? Fucking hell.

[drchucktingle]

vote BURY YOUR GAYS in final round of goodreads awards, a book that addresses this moment and moments like it by avenging them through what is essentially meta fan art by way of horror satire. a real world chance to pick up a ball that many have dropped.

i know i get a little RILED UP over timelines but i cant ignore the way this moment could potentially create something so potent. a history of dead queer characters leading to a book that directly stands in opposition to the trope finding success and elevated through FAN votes

like a rallying cry for every slain queer character. all of the fan fiction creations and erotic ships crawling from their graves and staggering into the bright lights of mainstream consciousness. BURY YOUR GAYS they groan. the cemetery was FULL. so many votes it cant be stopped

fun to think on potential realities, and especially fun when theyre just a FEW STEPS AWAY. if you want to trot that path with me then take a moment to vote bud, its very easy. if you voted last round you can do it again now.  lets shake things up buckaroos

VOTE HERE:

[lexreadsdiversely]

Screw Goodreads: Poetry Recommendations

Since goodreads doesn't think poetry matters, here's a random rec list for anyone who wants to read more poetry. You may find many of these titles on Libby and the Queer Liberation Library @queerliblib

Poetry collections I can personally recommend:

bone - Yrsa Daley-Ward

Wound from the Mouth of a Wound - torrin a. greathouse

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities - Chen Chen

Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics - Edited by T.C. Tolbert and Trace Peterson

Postcolonial Love Poem - Natalie Diaz

Thrown in the Throat - Benjamin Garcia

The Hurting Kind - Ada Limón

Night Sky with Exit Wounds - Ocean Vuong

And here are some of the many poetry collections on my tbr (libby, my beloved, please... I'm not above begging) but I figured I'd add them for folks to do their own exploring.

Eating the Archive - Yousif M. Qazmiyeh

If My Body Could Speak - Blythe Baird

Helium - Rudy Francisco

There Should Be Flowers - Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Corazón - Yesika Salgado

The Orange and Other Poems - Wendy Cope

The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde - Audre Lorde

I am Schizophrenic: Poetry from a Beautiful Brain - Kerenza Ryan

Blood Orange - Yaffa As

MARIPOSAS: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry - Edited by Emanuel Xavier

Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul - Ryka Aoki

Under Her Skin: A Women in Horror Poetry Showcase, Vol 1 - Edited by Lindy Ryan and Toni Miller

Life on Mars - Tracy K. Smith

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On - Franny Choi

Call Us What We Carry - Amanda Gorman

We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival - Edited by Andrea Gibson

Crush - Richard Siken

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head - Warsan Shire

The Tradition - Jericho Brown

The End of the Alphabet - Claudia Rankine

Beautiful Zero: Poems - Jennifer Willoughby

Calling a Wolf a Wolf - Kaveh Akbar

Individual poems:

Check out my poetry blog @thispoemisaboutyou

Poem-a-Day (also a podcast)

Appreciating Poetry:

If Poetry Confuses You, Watch This - Introduction to Poetry Appreciation

Disclaimer: I do not personally know if any of these authors are scumbags. I'll be doing research on each one soon (but a lot that goes on happens on twitter, and I don't touch twitter so I might miss shit). I encourage you to do your own research as well, and feel free to message me if you know something I don't.

**And as always, make sure you read the blurbs and check content warnings if you need to. Storygraph is great for content warnings if the author doesn't have them on their website**

okay stopping cuz this post is getting too long, but I'll make a part two at some point

[genericpuff]

"No TV coverage for my third win? :((("

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[rosesutherlandwrites]

What is HAPPENING this week Y'all. Y'ALL. A Sweet Sting Of Salt is nominated for a Goodreads Readers Choice Award! (in the fantasy category, which will never fail to crack me up a bit given how very historical fiction with a single fantasy element it is, but I love it)

I am already floored, regardless of the outcome. YOU did this, every one of you who's read, reviewed, shared on my silly promos, and generally helped me maintain my sanity from the very beginning of this little book's journey, and I could not be more grateful to you all. 💕🦭💕

If you use GR and would like to cast a vote for Salty, Jean, Muirin and I will all be very appreciative ❤️

[no-where-new-hero]

omg I need your thoughts on the terminally o line author culture bc ngl it makes my eye TWITCH, there are authors I deliberately avoid even tho I've heard their stuff is good bc they're like that 🙈

HHHHH oh good lord, okay, from how I see it, there are two angles on this, both aggravating and sad: the official decree one and the spontaneous ecosystem one.

The officious one is that the nature of publishing nowadays demands an author have an online presence. You need Twitter/X. You need to let every potential reader know your book is coming out. You need engagement through reviews and pre-orders incentives (if you buy now you’ll get a special keychain!!) and word of mouth assurances from your peers that yes your book is as cool as you say it is. You need a newsletter with links (more buying! more voting on lists that are simply popularity contests!) and promises you’re still working on the next thing, don’t forget about me in the morass of everyone else doing the same thing. You need an Instagram and TikTok now to post pretty pictures and videos because one or two authors made it big off this kind of promotion and now everyone thinks it’s the ticket to the bestseller list (sadly, it seems to be working). You need an OnlyFans (a joke but I do recall a twt spat that was a joke/not joke about how rupi kaur will always be more beautiful than her critics and people who took issue with the conflation of beauty with talent). At the end of all this, you’re basically an influencer, a content creator creating content for the content you should be focusing on creating, the finished novel. And the novel itself seems to be disappearing behind the masks used to promote it (fanfic-style tropes, moodboards, playlists, memes) until I now no longer trust the book that I’ll pick up to have any resemblance to the enticements that brought me here. I’ve seen an author or two complain about the stress all this self-promotion generates, but it’s become such an entrenched part of the industry, I think people just accept it. And thus spend too much time online hoping that if they tweet just a little more, produce just one more reel, maybe that’ll be the difference between a sale and no sale.

The other side of this, distinct but obviously connected, is the ecosystem created by this panic of being perpetually visible coupled with the fact that so many of the new authors came of age during the rise of internet fandom culture. That opinionated community mindset that blurs the line between anonymity and friendship is the lens they bring to their own work. I mean, it makes sense I suppose—if you love yelling about characters and words, why wouldn’t you do that once you start to produce your own? This really came home to me hearing about that reviewbombgate “scandal” and how people involved were in reylo circles and that was used to provide receipts. You’re interacting with your readers and peers about your intimate work but they are also all strangers. They will not always give you the benefit of the doubt, and now—as opposed to the past when maybe the worst that could happen was a handful of bad reviews in newspapers—you will either be tagged in hate reviews, sub-tweeted, explicitly called out, demanded to atone for your sins. It’s no longer the morality of consumption but the morality of production. Of course, the easy answer is just log-off, touch some grass. But that can work only when you and everyone else are separated by anonymous accounts or when you have no platform to maintain. As an author trying to make your livelihood from this, suddenly it’s do or die. We’re in a strange moment of authorship bringing the Internet’s echo-chamber and claustrophobic into the real world (this is a lie: publishing now is no longer the real world. But it looks like it) and thus you can kind of no longer escape things.

Will the average reader who isn’t aware of all these machinations care about reviewbombgate? Would a reader browsing at Target think about the controversies around Lightlark? Very likely not. But the impression I’m getting more and more is that the average reader isn’t the one buying all the books. Or shall we say—a bestseller’s status relies on bookstore stock. Bookstore stock is only huge when they know a book will be a good investment. They’ll only know a book is a good investment if it and its author has street cred based on booktokkers, bookstagram, bloggers and reviewers (have you noticed how many books out these last maybe 1-3 years have these kinds of accounts thanked in the acknowledgments? Yeah), and THESE are also chronically online people who will Know. And decide the cast of fate.

Honestly, @batrachised, I see why you avoid these kinds of writers, though I wonder how long it’ll be before the disease becomes epidemic.

[princessofbookaholics]

the goodreads choice awards manages to piss me off every year

[remnantglow]

losing my mind over this goodreads review of Mission Child by Maureen F. McHugh a little bit like did they read the book with their eyes closed 😭 yes wearing men's clothes for practical reasons does not make you queer. but i would argue that not only continuing to do so even after it is no longer necessary/needed, but also jumping at the chance to take HRT and alternating between (repeatedly and over the course of decades) stating you are both a man and a woman/that you are neither does, in fact, probably make you queer. what do i know though

[doubledaybooks]

Goodreads Choice Awards: Vote in the Opening Round of 2024!

Vote in the opening round of the 2024 Goodreads Choice Awards! We're thrilled and honored by readers who nominated our authors this year:

Fiction: SAME AS IT EVER WAS by Claire Lombardo

Audiobook & Historical Fiction: JAMES by Percival Everet

Historical Fiction: THE FROZEN RIVER by Ariel Lawhon

Romance: LIES & WEDDINGS by Kevin Kwan

Debut Novel: VICTIM by Andrew Boryga

Nonfiction: FRAMED by John Grisham

History & Biography: THE WIDE WIDE SEA by Hampton Sides

History & Biography: WHEN WOMEN RAN FIFTH AVENUE by Julie Satow

[books-and-cookies]

every year when the goodreads choice awards roll around, i realise how completely out of touch i am with new releases

i could only vote in 2 or 3 categories this year, which were horror, debut and historical nonfiction, because i haven't read almost any of the books in the other categories

i used to have so much fomo over not reading new releases, or not getting any new releases, and nowadays, i just can't be bothered, nor do i really care about not reading everything as it comes out (or ever, for that matter)

[drchucktingle]

truly honored to learn that BURY YOUR GAYS has made it to final round of GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS. even if you voted before you can now vote again LETS TROT BUCKAROOS WERE TAKIN THIS TO THE TOP (SOUND OF BUCKAROO BATTLE HORNS) LOVE IS REAL