18 thoughts on “Scoring the 2023 Dragon Award Nominees”

1. I watched Puss in Boots: The Last Wish the other day and it is good fun…but also has some elements in common Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker

2. Click

3. Neom is not necessarily the low-ratings book I would’ve expected to get picked up by the Dragon Awards, but it is a very good book!

4. Mike: Aren’t there 2 books with less than 100 ratings?
   20 Into the Vortex by Charles E. Gannon
   and
   68 The Revolutionary War by Christopher G. Nuttall

5. It’s hard to believe that The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler did not get nominated. 4.01 rating on Goodreads with 8,229 ratings.

6. StefanB: Thanks! (Note to self: Never proofread posts at midnight…)

7. Perhaps goodreads is not necessarily the best measure of an author popularity for some of these authors. Timothy Zahn, for example, has 88k followers on facebook, and engages directly with his fans there. If you were to assume that goodreads was the sole arbitor of author popularity on the internet, then it would appear confusing that Zahn gets published at all, much less gets nominated for fan-voted awards. I would suggest that fans of the other authors with low goodreads numbers similarly have other places where they assert their fandom.

8. C. Wolf: It would be entertaining to draw up a chart of their Facebook numbers too. I study Goodreads ratings because they relate to questions I’m curious about. This is a free, publicly-voted award that never reveals voting statistics. How do things get on the ballot? Is there a correlation between what people are reading and what books become finalists? Also, despite these being labeled “Best” book categories, nobody can read and compare all the finalists in the short window of several weeks between the release of the ballot and DragonCon. Looking at Goodreads ratings is a way of reminding people of that.

9. The Problem with Facebook is that it tells us the popularity of the writer not of the work. The Problem is that there doesn’t seem to exist any reliable messure of how sucesful any work is (I remember Scalzi talking about the bookscannumbers, which were quite a bit of for him).
   I don’t mind seeing other mesures, it would be interesting if exspecially Gannon, whos work has very low numbers does better there.

10. You would have to look at all social media. Facebook is very old fashioned and many people will probably have more Instagram or TikTok users: Kuang has over 100k followers on Instagram. And there are more new social media apps now with Twitter’s changes. So it’s almost impossible and Goodreads offers a good temperature check.

11. For what it’s worth, the top science fiction, fantasy, YA novels all made the NYT bestseller list last year, which is not the same as having sales numbers but it does indicate mainstream success.

12. Stefan B. – I’m suggesting that different kinds of fan engagement are possibly more important than book sales or goodreads numbers, and that fan devotion to individual authors could be a bigger driver of voting for the Dragon. Charles Gannon is a good example. Regardless of what his sales numbers are, he has two fan pages on facebook, one of which has 1200 followers. When voting for the award began, Gannon posted that he would be honored if they would consider Into the Vortex for Best Fantasy Novel. If even 200 or 300 or more of those fans took him up on it, and that’s enough votes to get on the ballot, then it doesn’t matter if a best-selling paranormal romance novel sold a half a million more copies and had 175,000 goodreads ratings when that book’s author and fans couldn’t care less about the Dragon Awards. Gannon’s readers, like Correia’s, probably skew a little more conservative, and conservative readers tend to avoid goodreads (they generally regard it as an SJW cesspool) and spend more time on web forums where they have direct access to the author. Christopher Nuttall doesn’t get very many online reviews, but all of his books are on Kindle Unlimited, he has 4500 facebook followers, his own mailing list and discussion forum, and he haunts Baen’s Bar on a daily basis. I doubt he needs more than a fraction of those people to vote for his book to become a finalist, if he suggests that it matters to him. I’m just as interested in knowing where Neom voters came from. Tidhar is not a huge bestseller nor does he get a ton of reviews on goodreads, but I’ll bet if you canvassed library patrons and indie bookstore customers you’d likely find a lot more enthusiasm for Neom than in other corners of fandom. Are those people voting in reasonably high numbers? As Mike said, we know nothing about voter numbers or the degree to which the administrators of the award manipulate the results to their liking. I doubt Dragon Con will ever release voter statistics to the public and they are probably even less interested in breaking down voter demographics. Raw votes are still probably at least a major guiding factor in determining the finalists, and I think a lot of those votes are coming from somewhere other than just goodreads users.

13. @C. Wolf: I don’t disagree about your mainpoint that not beeing popular on Godreads means a work can’t be popular. I mentioned Gannon because he is a writer who has multible awardsnominations and his numbers were suprisingly low.
    Your other mainpoint that it maters who nominates is also a point (and the Dragon Award is an award where we have zero information here).
    My point was more that I seperate liking a writer from liking a work, (I have voted a work from the same writer on Position 1 on my ballot and also dead last another work) but this may be only me.

14. @StefanB: I’m the same kind of voter, but I wonder how many award voters (especially in the Hugo and Dragon) are the opposite and vote for just their favorite author (or two or three etc.) no matter what they put out. I suspect there are more of them than there are of us. Possibly I’m just being cynical.

15. @StefanB

    The Problem with Facebook is that it tells us the popularity of the writer not of the work.

    I follow a lot of authors on Facebook — but I don’t read them all. Some I follow because they post great jokes and memes. Others I follow because … well, I don’t always remember. 🙂 But then, that’s true of other social media as well. I follow some authors because I’ve read their books, some because I want to read them someday, some because they post interesting stuff, and some because of reasons I don’t remember.

    @C. Wolf

    Gannon’s readers, like Correia’s, probably skew a little more conservative, and conservative readers tend to avoid goodreads (they generally regard it as an SJW cesspool) and spend more time on web forums where they have direct access to the author.

    I wonder if they get that impression because of media coverage about Goodreads users who one-star a book after the author does something controversial? Yet there are also many Goodreads members who one-star books for featuring queer characters or for featuring characters of color — and the Overlords of Goodreads don’t do a thing about that, either. People with all sorts of opinions review books on Goodreads.

    I wonder how often these books are discussed on Reddit? But that would be hard to quantify. (Those threads can go on forever…)

16. @Anne: And the same kind of people also automatically one-star books that have even mild expletives, straight monogamous married sex, and aren’t exactly the subset of Christianity (let alone other religions) they prefer.

17. Pingback: The 2023 Dragon Award Finalists: Mostly Good with a Oddities | Cora Buhlert

18. Pingback: Some Comments on the 2023 Dragon Award Winners | Cora Buhlert

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.