15 thoughts on “Goodreads Choice Awards 2017 Winners”

1. I know fantasy is more popular than sci-fi but seeing the gap in the voting numbers is still a bit of a jolt.

2. I keep seeing evidence of Sarah Maas’ huge popularity (the win here, plus whenever a Maas book is in a Goodreads giveaway, where other writers get hundreds of entries, Maas gets thousands), but hardly ever see discussion of her work online. Is it all happening on YA-oriented sites I don’t browse?

3. I’m reading my way through the YA finalists and finding some gems like Warcross and Strange the Dreamer but I just don’t get Sarah Maas. I’ve reviewed her a couple of times but I find her books sort of impenetrable and full of oh-so-serious people with stylish names, endlessly dominating each other in nonsexual ways until somebody gets aggrieved enough to bust out the magic.

   I didn’t like the Horror and Fantasy winners either, so maybe I’m being out of touch and cranky. Oh well, that’s never stopped me before.

4. I know it was inevitable but I’m disappointed to see the screenplay of a Harry Potter spin-off win in fantasy.

5. Some of the wins were obvious because of the popularity of the series or author, but I’m really impressed Waking Gods came in second (giant robots woo!) and VE Schwab should be proud, to be under 4k votes from Gaiman in a popularity contest against pop culture heavyweights still drawing those numbers?!

6. Oneiros: I know it was inevitable but I’m disappointed to see the screenplay of a Harry Potter spin-off win in fantasy.

   Especially because it’s YA and there’s a YA category — I don’t know why it ended up in the main fantasy category. I guess it’s because some people don’t want to admit to themselves what they’re reading is YA.

7. Is it really? I thought it was an expanded version of the original Comic Relief (?) release, which was more an in-universe bestiary than anything to do with the film, since the original series of books hadn’t even been finished yet let alone the filme conceived of. I have a copy of the original, somewhere – they also put out Quidditch Through The Ages. They both purported to be replicas of Harry Potter’s personal copies, I think, complete with handwritten notes. Small Potter fan me quite liked them.

   (I’ve been having mysterious technical difficulties accessing the site, and it only just occurred to me to try it with a different browser.)

8. Oh, I just checked, they were indeed Comic Relief releases and the new one is an updated and expanded version (the original was quite slim). It is not an adaptation of the film, rather the film was (sort of, ish, if you squint, a lot) an adaptation of the original book. I don’t really think it should have won versus completely new works (or even just actual novels, for that matter), personally, but it isn’t a novelisation.

9. It’s odd, then, that they would call it “The Original Screenplay” but oh well.

   Anyway it’s a popular vote, and Potter is inexplicably still absurdly popular. Disappointing either way, but not unexpected.

10. @Oneiros

    If there are two of them out I daresay it got a double dose of votes from people as equally confused as me. Certainly the one that Waterstones has spent most of the year trying to convince me to buy is the bestiary version.

    (I voted for The Bear and the Nightingale, which may or may not be going on my Best Novel noms next year. I’m not having much luck with novels, but to be fair I’ve been focusing on the short fiction categories. Campbell for sure, though..)

11. What won was the screenplay of the movie that just came out. See the amazon listing. This book was

    inspired by the original Hogwart’s textbook by Newt Scamander, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original screenplay marks the screenwriting debut of J.K. Rowling

    And the main character is supposed to be the author of that original bestiary.

12. I don’t take the Goodreads Awards very seriously, honestly. They’re pretty much the awards for most-widely-read-book, which isn’t meaningless, but it’s information I can get fairly easily elsewhere and doesn’t tell me much about whether I will like the book or not.

13. Is Fantastic Beasts actually marketed as YA (or indeed children’s)? I haven’t particularly noticed it if so. The fact that it is set in a universe originally created for children does not imply it (c.f. Boneland, and indeed, if you go by order of publication, The Lord of the Rings, and it would count as adult on the ‘protagonist’s age’ criterion which seems to be all the rage nowadays.

14. Barnes and Noble covered all the bases and had it in the children’s section, the YA section and the SFF section. Plus around the stores in dumps too when it first came out. It was marketed to “all of the above” as far as I could tell.

15. I’ve been tracking the fate of the write-ins through the rounds, so just to finish up: the most successful write-in by a long way was Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson, managing a creditable 5th in Fantasy despite not being released until towards the end of the competition. No other write-ins made the final in SF or Fantasy, but three can take credit for having beaten at least one original entry in the final tallies – Silence Fallen by Patricia Briggs, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, and Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty.

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