jsburbidge | Entries tagged with hugo awards

I was browsing through some old posts of my own and, aside from noting some irritating typos I really should go back and fix, I noticed that in a post I had made earlyish last year on SF popularity I had identified a set (the intersection of the LT top five nominations and the Bakka bestsellers list) which had, later on, turned out to be a pretty good predictor (4/5 -- missing only the Cixin Liu book which, naturally turned out to be the winner) of the novels which would have been on the Hugo Awards nomination list in the absence of the Puppies' slating.

This actually makes some sense, when you come to think of it, because the process of saying "these are my top five books of 2014", although not constrained to books published in 2014 (as the Hugos were) is very similar for Hugo nominations and submissions to the LT list.

This year's list has about half the number of participants as last year's, but it's already interesting in terms of what it suggests are popular choices. The SF novels on the LT list which (a) have more than one member adding them and (b) are eligible for Hugos for MidAmericon II are:

Uprooted (Novik) - 10 members

Ancillary Mercy (Leckie) - 7 members

Seveneves (Stephenson) - 3 members

Sorceror to the Crown (Cho) - 2 members

The Shepherd's Crown (Pratchett) - 2 members

The Just City (Walton) - 2 members

Aurora (Robinson) - 2 members

Unsurprisingly, the list also corresponds to the general set of books which I've seen regularly noticed positively in SFF fora.

It's also still in progress – yesterday there were two sponsors for The Library at Mount Char, but one of them has shifted their support overnight and it's down to one vote.

All three Ancillary books are in the top 100. Interestingly, The Three-Body Problem is in slot 111 (with one sponsor), but was not on last year's list at all. The other Hugo winners on the list with more than one sponsor are Among Others, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and Doomsday Book (there are many more with only one sponsor).

This could still change -- more members are likely to post their favourites to the LT list -- but it's certainly an easier way of handicapping the "core" (non-puppy) Hugo nominations than going through the extensive analysis that Chaos Horizon goes through.

ETA: The Bakka bestseller list for last year is now out, and the intersection is a bit smaller than the set given above.

It is:

Uprooted (Novik)

Ancillary Mercy (Leckie)

The Shepherd's Crown (Pratchett)

The Just City (Walton)

Foxglove Summer (Aaronovitch) - only one sponsor, but on the Bakka list

I read Eric Flint's latest post on popularity, and something kept bothering me, until I realized that he had got one thing subtly wrong: He is measuring the popularity of authors, not of works.

Sure, David Weber is more popular, by measurement of shelf space, than Lois McMaster Bujold: but that's partly because Weber publishes two to three books a year and Bujold one (fewer recently, as she hasn't been entirely well, I understand). More to the point: how do War of Honor and Paladin of Souls (published at about the same time, the latter winning both a Hugo and a Nebula) compare in total sales? How does Shadow of Freedom stack up against Ancillary Justice (both 2013 novels)?

Flint's measure regards a combined metric of popular and prolific. (Martin and Tolkien are the exceptions: small sets of volumes with massive popularity, but a general estimate of high quality.) The measure of popularity appropriate for the Hugos is not by the author but by the work, and I have not seen any evidence that the normal Hugo winner of the past few years is necessarily significantly less popular than an average work by the "popular" authors.

Perhaps I should draw back from that claim a bit: the figures I looked at before suggest that Hugo winners are not necessarily among the very most popular SFF novels of their years, and that the disparity probably does reflect a judgement by Hugo voters tilted towards best rather than most popular. But I also think that it is generally true that Hugo winners and nominees are among the most popular SFF works of their years.

So where is the whole Sad/Rabid Puppy thing going?

The talk is unlikely to die down in nine, or even ninety-nine days (which would still not quite get us quite to Worldcon), although I suspect that there will be no tales of Mad Puppy vanishing in a puff of petulance and returning with a bag of slates of candidates to hand out to grateful children.

That being said, will this end up being more than a tempest in a teapot?

Some commenters, like GRRM, are not very sanguine.

My own view is that the Hugos as an institution will survive quite well. The surge in supporting memberships reflects a ton of anecdata regarding people only tenuously connected to Worldcon fandom enlisting to respond to the threat to voting norms represented by the Puppies. (I'm sure there are new Puppy memberships as well, but there are certainly many anti-puppy new members.) Whether they take the full-bodied nuclear option and vote No Award to everything, or vote No Award above only slate candidates[1], or vote No Award on merit after reading extensively - and my judgement so far is that the quality of most slate candidates is below Hugo level - the outcome is not likely to be friendly to the slate model. Note that new Puppy members' votes will be spread across the spectrum compared to No Award voters - an inverse of the situation with the nominations. (This argument does make the assumption, justified in my experience of reading slate-nominated stories, that voting on merit and voting in principle against this slate will come to much the same thing, given the quality of this slate.)

And those new members will be far more likely to nominate next year than the normal crop.

The awards may take a hit for a year or two, but not a permanent one. One or another voting scheme may pass two Business Meetings which will make it harder for slates to prosper: I know that a 4/6 model has been submitted, and there's a more comprehensive proposal coming from a discussion with Bruce Schneier at Making Light. (Single Divisible Vote, Least Popular Elimination)

I also see signs of a move to provide better ongoing feedback to alert people to good shorter fiction works. If anything, there will be several such initiatives, representing different viewpoints. If there's anything fandom is good at, it's representing different viewpoints.

The candidates who were put forward and then withdrew seem, if anything, to be in a good position: many fen are buying their works in support. If they write well, they will have a set of new readers.

If any genuinely good authors have had their profiles raised by the Puppy slates - Kloos seems like a possibility - they may get Hugo recognition in future years.

The core Puppies' nominees, the ones who have not withdrawn - Wright, especially, who really does seem to appeal to a subset of conservative fans - are unlikely to suffer: the people who will reject or dislike their work were not part of their likely market in any case, and they will increase sales to their partisans.

I also see signs that there will be at least one (depending on how well people can coordinate) unofficial award contest for the would-have-been nominees once the full information is released in August. I suspect they will also turn out, in the end, to have lost little in publicity or sales, though the chance of an actual Hugo will have been foregone.

There are deep divisions emerging between the leaders of the Sad Puppies and their partisans, on one side, and much of fandom on the other. Those divisions will not easily be healed, and fen have long memories, but I don't know how much communication there was in the first place: this hasn't so much cut apart groups as made existing divisions deeper.

Finally, as far as sales go, most SF readers are not fen, and I would expect the main net impact on sales to be a wash, except for time lost to authors writing philippics instead of fiction.

Personally, I am not a member of convention fandom; my idea of a nice convention is an academic conference. My involvement in fandom has been principally online, dating back to Usenet /rasfw and mailing lists in the 1990s. But I, like others, have been motivated to buy a Supporting Membership to Sasquan to cast a vote in defence of the Hugos (not for the package: I could buy the works I want to read for less than the membership cost, having read relatively widely last year).

[1]My personal inclination, except in the one case (Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form) where I can be morally sure that several works would have been on the ballot in any case. I'm not sure I've seen anyone else point out strongly that voting most slate candidates below No Award does them an injury only if it's likely that they would have been on the ballot in any case.

One of the complaints which pre-dates the Sad Puppies regarding the Hugos is that a subset of authors dominate the awards. The SP's have picked up on this and given it a twist, but even before them it was not uncommon to see suggestions regarding rules for disqualifying authors for years immediately subsequent to wins.

This is a poor idea. Although there certainly are authors whose repeated nominations in the Best Novel category must be chalked up in part to the effects of self-publicity at the personal level (Scalzi, McGuire, and Sawyer, in varying ways and degrees) and some who are acknowledged masters who also have been nominated (and sometimes won) for inferior work (Asimov, Willis, Bujold), it's also true that a great author at the top of his/her form can produce a cluster of great novels tightly spaced, which are legitimately the best, or arguably the best, of the year.

Ann Leckie is a fair example. Ancillary Sword is not, in my opinion, the very best novel of 2014, but it's certainly arguably one of the best five, and I can see some readers legitimately considering it the best.

As for the authors of whom it could legitimately be said that they gain votes as the result of self-publicity: the self-publicity is real enough, but it's not about rewards: it's about sales. Scalzi, Stross, McGuire et al. maintain strong online presences with lots of readers not because they're in a permanent Hugo campaign, but because they want to sell more books. The Hugo posts are a minor offshoot of the general ongoing self-promotion. (Note that selling yourself on social media is standard advice to authors of all stripes these days; these are merely at the high (power-law) end of the scale as far as success goes.)

As a result of economic changes in publishing, social media self-promotion by authors is not going to go away. Some authors avoid doing this for awards, and are quite emphatic about it (e.g. Jo Walton), but it's a little unrealistic not to expect an author not noting when his or her book has come out, or what it's about.

It's worth remembering that the Hugos not infrequently are won by works by authors who have never been nominated before - Clarke, Leckie, Chabon, Bacigalupi, Walton.

Trying to correct for the impact of social media by setting up rules on the awards is the wrong approach. Generalized signal boosting for other authors' works - throughout the year, not tied directly to awards - is probably a better idea.

As I was walking through an Indigo the other day, I saw a sign with the headline "We need more diverse books", and a set of authors' photographs below. What it meant, of course, was not that we need more books with diverse topics (Mesopotamian History! Arc Welding! Urban Fantasy/Time-travel crossovers! Studies of ecosystem diversity!) but that we need more books (or more read books) by authors who come from different ethnic / gender / cultural backgrounds (and probably mainly in fiction, at a guess).

There is a very long way to go here, but this has become mainstream. Not universal, but mainstream, for all of the ways in which society still fails in this area. Chapters / Indigo may reflect Heather Reisman's personality to a degree, but it is currently very focussed indeed on margins, and anything that gets through sales and marketing is going to be optimized for appealing to the maximum number of its customers (the broad reading public) and to offending as few as possible.

The argument over the Sad Puppies slate reminded me of this. One defender of the slate talked of "extreme politics" as characterizing the (normal) Hugo nominees, and said "Fandom needs to regain some balance, lest every con turn into WisCon".

Now, aside from the fact that I see no likelihood of every con turning into WisCon, it seems to me that fandom is not (in this matter at least) a hothouse of far-left counter-cultural SJW extremism. It is merely reflecting the broad emerging core of society as a whole, which is shifting (glacially) in the direction of awareness of diversity issues, awareness of privilege issues, awareness of the changing understanding of mental health, and awareness of pervasive bias involving the treatment of violence against women and sexual assault generally. The same problems which have created tensions around the anti-harassment policies in cons long ago triggered a massive change in HR rules in any company large enough to have an HR department.

Fandom is not moving away from a notional "centre" towards an extreme, or even edgy, position; it's shifting (generationally, and gradually) along with a general shift in social consensus.

First, although (along generally left-leaning lines) one can make an argument that everything is political, in the more normal use of the word, aesthetic and cultural judgements which reflect that shift are not particularly "political". Or, put another way: if, like John C. Wright and VD, you are generally in revolt against "secular modern culture", i.e. the mainstream, you really should expect that the mainstream you are in revolt against is going to be inhabited by most of the other people and institutions you interact with.

Imagine that you have a spectrum of positions, (visualizable as a cloud of points spread out left to right, with greater densities toward the middle) and add an additional dimension of time. Your visualization now looks like a bunch of strands of flexible spaghetti going from past to future. In general, one generation's bleeding edge is the next one's commonplace on social issues, so in general that higher density area bends gradually leftward as time goes by. From an external perspective, what is happening is that the views espoused by the mainstream are the progressive views of yesterday. There is always a heavy clumping about the centre, but what the centre holds changes gradually with time. From the perspective of somebody who represents a strand of thought which was mildly conservative N years ago and centrist 2N years ago, though, it looks as though there is no centre anymore. Society now seems divided between the right and the far left. This effect is magnified if he/she also projects a "silent majority" at the centre and underestimate the numbers at the actual centre.

The Sad Puppies are in that latter position.

To be fair, there's some differences between them, at least as far as the leaders go. Torgersen seems to come off fairly well here: he avoided putting his own work on the list, it's reasonably well-respected, and the bone I have to pick with his general argument is just that he generalizes his tastes to the majority of SF readers, something which is, I think, no longer true. (He also asserts that there is a decline in SFF sales compared to the past, which is certainly debatable: that golden age of the Heinlein heyday had many fewer authors and, frankly, divided a smaller pie into fewer slices, and many of the works which are now published as YA would then have simply been SF (indeed, I have seen adult SFF of my youth recently republished as part of a YA line).) Correia comes across as a second-amendment fiction writer whose work is basically mind candy but who really wants a Hugo and is putting his work forward under the cover of a general slate. VD and Wright both appear to be the sort of RCs who are likely to think the current Pope a dangerous radical and are writing from a position that their held doctrine tells them is at the centre of the world. Hoyt just comes across as an obsessed right-wing Republican to the point of sounding unhinged.

Secondly, it really doesn't look to me as though the factors influencing the general Hugo ballot reflect any particular leftish agenda. The test case really ought to be John Scalzi's Redshirts, since that does look like the immediate trigger that set off the Sad Puppies reaction[1]. I had a reaction to the win at the time which was not wildly enthusiastic, but it was running against a weak field, and there was no evidence at all that it was the result of politically-biased voting; like the win for Hominids a decade earlier, it reflected a certain degree of crowd-pleasingness in the novel. (If there had been a left-agenda driven conspiracy, it would have been more likely to pick up Jemisin's The Killing Moon (which was seventh in the nominations) or Kiernan's The Drowning Girl (eleventh). Both are excellent novels, but they are also far more in dialogue with the concerns of the left than Scalzi's playing around with Star Trek is.)

Thirdly, I see two ways in which the defenders of the Sad Puppies list defend it. There are problems with both ways.

Some defenders assert that the list is explicitly political, but justify it by the "politicization" of the existing system. This is at least honest, but given the above, there's really no honest reason for seeing the selection of the Hugo nominees as reflecting anything more than the general cultural mainstream, tending a bit towards the tastes of urban readers (we live in a world with more urban readers than rural ones).

Some, on the other hand, claim that the list is merely an equivalent of the many other posts which appear recommending what the writers feel to be the best SF works of the year -- that, if I may translate, any politics lies merely in the general worldview of the compilers rather than in a "political selection".[2]

Based on this year's list, I find that hard to believe: not because the books they recommend are not necessarily good -- I don't know enough about some of them -- but because of the fact that it manages to exclude Leckie, Walton, Gladstone, Bennett, Addison, Watts, Liu, Mitchell, Grossman, Abraham, and indeed all of the novels on the Locus Recommended Books List. All of them. The Locus list is pretty broad; it certainly includes a range of novels I am not particularly inclined to read, as well as books I would recommend. On any honest selection of genuinely-believed-to-be-best novels coming from a minority position I would certainly expect to see some books ignored by the Locus list, but I find it wildly unlikely that it would exclude every single one: that is understandable only on the claim (see above) that the list is a corrective rather than a "personal favourites" list.

As a side remark, another justification for the Sad Puppies involves popularity versus a perceived effect of the "elites" on the selection of nominees. I already talked about popularity a few posts back, but when I look at the nominees for past years I am reminded that almost every year there is an outcry after Eastercon that the nominees have passed over many (if not most or all, depending on the screed) of the really deserving works in favour of purely popular but mediocre novels. If the elites are weighing in on the selection, maybe someone should tell them, because they certainly don't seem to be aware of the fact themselves.

The other question, I suppose, is why this matters.

Remember the Delphi game in Brunner's The Shockwave Rider? If you throw a bunch of individual inputs together, you stand a decent chance of getting a result that "means" something. In the case of the Hugos, what it's supposed to mean is that the prize reflects the overall views of committed fandom (as opposed to the people who "just read the stuff"). It's not as good as a random statistical sample, and it's complicated by the fact that fen don't have genuinely independent views, but that perception is what gives the Hugo it's value and prestige.

The sample isn't very big, though. Statistically, it doesn't have to be. Fandom worldwide is probably in the mid-to-high tens of thousands; the voters in last year's Worldcon, attendees plus associate members, numbered 3,587 (actual ballots: there were 8,784 eligible voters). The previous high mark was 2,100, in 2011. Nominations, however, are a much smaller set: that year there were 1,495 nominations for Best Novel and the cut-off for the ballot occurred between Parasite, with 98 votes, and The Shining Girls, with 96. And nominations are critical: they control the field that larger sample has to choose from.

In that context, having slates that are being pushed for any "external" purposes can skew the results significantly without being a large part of the voting public. Getting a few tens of followers to vote for such a slate - which might not reflect what they would otherwise have voted for - can have a significant impact on the field of nominees. There were over 200 nominations last year which were Sad Puppy influenced (184 for Warbound and 91 for A Few Good Men, but there may have been some votes which would have gone there in any case; if the nominations had split a little differently between the two, both would have made the ballot and pushed Parasite off). 270 votes (or the 332 who finally voted for Warbound) won't have a massive impact on the final vote, if they're being cast for works which don't have general support in any case; but they can certainly have an effect on nominations.

If somebody really feels that Skin Game is the best novel from last year, more power to them. But if Butcher gets onto the ballot because a group of people want to show the effete snobs what they think of them, it does neither him nor the Hugos any credit.

[1]Scalzi is particularly anathema to the camp, it seems, because conservative / milSF types liked Old Man's War and were then disillusioned by his public political statements on his website. In addition, I can see how Scalzi's personal self-promotional style could be seen as the sort of campaigning which somebody who dislikes his work could see as logrolling to be countered.

[2]There certainly were people involved in the debate last year who seemed to have genuinely bounced off Ancillary Justice completely, for all its general popularity and its Space Opera roots (which one would think would endear it to SF traditionalists), and have been enthusiastic readers of Correia. However, this seems to have been a minority position even within the supporters of the Sad Puppies.

I see (via File 770) that the Sad Puppies slate looks as though it will be back for another year.

The logic involved is somewhat tortuous, but a big chunk of it seems to be tied up in the view that because the Hugo awards are a fan-based majority vote, popularity as shown in sales should match up with ranking in the nominations, and that therefore the usual nominees are somehow rigged by a clique… something like that.

The Hugos (as I've noted before) are not simply a popularity contest; an examination of the general pattern of nominations shows that voters do filter, to some degree, by a perceived quality in a way different from simple sales. Selecting "the book I liked best from the year" is not the same as selecting "the book that I read that sold the most copies last year". Every year, pretty well, there's a scuffle over the nominees regarding their relative perceived or real inferiority to a commenter's preferred slate, and that's the usual context for this question. The Sad puppies complaint is a little different: they want the vote to reflect simple popularity, and think that the books that they like are popular enough that their exclusion is an injury to them.

What do we mean by popular?

When people talk about a book being popular, we can mean two things: first, (usually) that a lot of people buy it (i.e. it's a "bestseller"), and secondly, that people like it a lot. These are not the same thing.

Bestseller lists get manipulated or otherwise mangled. Most involve some form of human judgement to filter them, even if only in selecting sources; Amazon generates its top 100 lists automatically, but it has to use some form of algorithm to age entries so that recent sales of new books are significant but ongoing sales of popular books also count, and once one starts to get into categories it gets a bit blurry -- books will sometimes be allocated to a "wrong" category and there may be multiple instances of the same book in different formats. Measures of how much people like things involving ratings are extremely difficult to calibrate (some people rate almost all books at 5/5 or 4/5, and this may reflect merely a reluctance to grade down, not that they think that hundreds of books are all the best thing since sliced bread).

However, LibraryThing has a "Top Five Books of 2014" set of lists, with (as of now) 962 books entered on members' lists. If we ignore internal rankings, and compare against a snapshot of the Amazon lists where (again) we don't worry about fine rankings but simply about presence on the list, we can come to some limited conclusions.

(I've taken the SF and Fantasy separate lists from Amazon, giving me a potential set of 200 books, although in fact (once I get rid of media tie-ins and duplicates) it's a lot shorter. I also eliminated Kindle books at less than 8.99, where popularity is artificially pushed up by comparison to other books by a low price.)

First, a lot of books appear on only one list and not the other. More precisely (because given the constraints we're comparing a list of 960 to a list potentially of only 200 items and actually of a little over 100 titles), most of the bestselling novels do not appear on people's favourite lists. Only 17 books are within the intersection of the two sets.

Secondly, although both lists have a heavy mixture of non-recent books, only a few books are older than the last five years (Oryx and Crake, The Sirens of Titan, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings). (Older books on the Amazon list look suspiciously, as a class, as though their numbers are inflated by course assignments; this is obviously not a major concern for the LibraryThing list.)

Thirdly, although the LT list had most of my preferred fiction of last year (it missed out of Saunders' The March North, which wasn't surprising, given its low readership), only one of those books was also on the Amazon lists: Ancillary Sword.

As an interesting additional datum, The Goblin Emperor was Bakka's number one hardcover bestseller for 2014, and Watts' Echopraxia is #6, but neither appear on the recent Amazon rankings (I know, apples and oranges, as one is cumulative over a year and the other is a cross-section at one point of time).

If I apply the Bakka cumulative list as a third filter, I'm down to "countable on the fingers of a mutilated hand": Ancillary Justice and The Slow Regard Of Silent Things.

(If I match the Bakka data against the LibraryThing Data and don't consider Amazon, 5 of the books are in the top 500: The Goblin Emperor, The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Skin Game, Lock In, and Ancillary Justice.)

The first thing that this all tells me is that except for narrow purposes the Amazon data is largely, but not entirely, useless. It is, in one context, useful to know that Tolkien and Martin continue to be highly popular authors, or that Star Trek / Star Wars spin-offs continue to be a licence to print money: especially if you translate that into the general conclusion that most of the profitable print media sales are driven by exposure on TV and in the cinema.[1] However, if you're the sort of person for whom that is useful (e.g. a Managing Editor at an SF imprint trying to work out a model for weighing publications in the next year's budget) you probably already have much better data than Amazon provides, e.g. via Bookscan and your own sales figures. For anyone else, the redundancy in products and the limited scope of the list -- a lot of very popular novels might make the list in a blip, if at all -- makes it not very useful. The further manipulation by including low-priced Kindle books further distorts any signal as regards quality or trends in taste.[2]

The second thing is that once one uses two or more filters of a different type, it tends to select works of high or at least highish quality (although not necessarily works to everyone's taste), but it cuts off too high. If you're looking for advice as to what to read and you follow any general review site at all or are aware of what is managing to make the NYT extended bestseller list you'll already be aware that all of the works selected are hugely popular, and (with a few exceptions, such as Leckie) tend to come from writers with a track record of years of popularity.

If I were to select books from any of these lists with an eye to ones which I think will last (ignoring ones like those by Tolkien and Vonnegut which already have lasted), I'd certainly be discarding a good number of even the top entries and probably promoting a number which don't make the very top. (It can be illuminating to look at the Locus awards runners up for, say, the 1970's and 1980's and realize that many of these books/authors were popular enough to make an end-of-year best list but have sunk without a trace since; on the other hand, some that are relatively low down the list are still around.)

Amazon top 100 overlap with LibraryThing best books of 2014

Science Fiction:

1. The Martian: A Novel; by Andy Weir; Paperback; LT2

8. The Bone Clocks: A Novel; by David Mitchell; Hardcover; LT39

35. Oryx and Crake; by Margaret Atwood; Paperback; LT732

52. Ancillary Sword (Imperial Radch); by Ann Leckie; Kindle Edition LT334

53. Red Rising; by Pierce Brown; Hardcover; LT44

67. Ready Player One: A Novel; by Ernest Cline; Paperback; LT20

91. The Sirens of Titan: A Novel; by Kurt Vonnegut; Paperback; LT740

100. Ancillary Justice; by Ann Leckie; Paperback; LT4

Fantasy

1. A Song of Ice And Fire; by George R.R. Martin; Mass Market Paperback; LT118

6. The Hobbit; by J. R. R. Tolkien; Kindle Edition; LT147

13. The Lord Of The Rings; by J.R.R. Tolkien; Paperback; LT147

15. The Ocean At The End Of The Lane; by Neil Gaiman; Paperback; LT5

16. Written In My Own Heart's Blood; by Diana Gabaldon; Hardcover; LT82

18. The Slow Regard Of Silent Things; by Patrick Rothfuss; Hardcover; LT65

23. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage; by Haruki Murakami; Hardcover; LT171

62. The Way of Kings; by Brandon Sanderson; Kindle Edition; LT113

76. Lies of Locke Lamora; by Scott Lynch; Paperback; LT72

Is the assumption that less popular books than the Sad Puppies are being selected true?

Now that we've established that the idea of "popularity" is slippery, let's look at the question of whether, in fact, less popular books are being preferred for the Hugos and whether the Sad Puppies preferred books are in fact more popular.

One can note from the list above that last year's winner, Ancillary Justice, is still in the top 100 Amazon bestsellers, and was ranked fourth on the LibraryThing list. Now it has undoubtedly had an awards boost: I doubt it (or its sequel) would be anywhere near as high on the current Amazon list if it had not won four major awards last year. On the other hand, the winning of four awards, and the high ranking by people who had read it, reflects an initial popularity (in both senses) which has merely created a feedback loop.

So let's look at the current popularity, as reflected by Amazon sales, among last year's novel nominees. To level the playing field as regards format (some books are MMPB and some only trade) we'll compare only Kindle rankings, which are more similar in terms of the price points.

Ancillary Justice, 1,473

Neptune's Brood, 34,494

Parasite, 23,439

The Wheel of Time (as represented by The Eye of The World), 2,006

Warbound, 30,604

(Order is the ranking of position 1, position 2, as determined by different runoffs.)

So Warbound, generally considered the best candidate on the Sad Puppies list, is fourth out of five by current popularity. (As regards the fifth, there's a reason Charlie is emphasizing The Laundry Files and the world-walker series: NB was considered relatively "difficult" and sold less well, for all of its favourable reception by a number of critics, Paul Krugman included. For that matter, it came in third on the Locus Award list, which is as close to a straight-up popularity poll as SF has, so it can't be considered all that unpopular.)

It's also clear that "popularity" in the sales sense isn't reflected in the order.

If we extend the consideration to all the nominated novels as shown in the final statistics, and order by Kindle store popularity, we get:

Steelheart, 390

Ancillary Justice, 1,473

The Wheel of Time, 2,006

The Golem and the Djinni, 2,033

Under a Graveyard Sky, 2,628

The Republic of Thieves, 4,109

London Falling, 56,720

Abaddon's Gate, 7,990

The Shining Girls, 12,805

Parasite, 23,439

Warbound, 30,604

Neptune's Brood, 34,494

A Stranger in Olondria, 48,153

River of Stars, 101,135

A Few Good Men, 354,878

If the sad puppies want a champion, Ringo is a far more popular writer than Correia. By the same token, Sarah Hoyt is probably not a good choice. Just sayin'.

If the Hugos were a genuine popularity contest based on sales, Sanderson would be taking home the rocket, probably on a regular basis (his two Stormlight books are currently at 1197 and 801, for comparison to the above list). He's not, but seems to be quite happy writing books he wants to write. Of course, he's laughing all the way to the bank. That being said, Steelheart gets a boost in sales as a YA book, but that's a negative factor in Hugo contention.

I think we can close the book on the complaint that the sad puppies are being deprived of a prominence their popularity entitles them to.

The overall sense I get is that their complaint comes from an alternate universe, coloured heavily by a subjective sense that all those other fans out there can't actually enjoy works X, Y, and Z which are talked up and then nominated, and must be insincere. De gustibus, and it's hard to believe that you're in a minority. (One of the things that emerged from some of the online discussion last year is that there really are engaged readers who authentically like Carreia's and Day's work, and equally authentically dislike the Leckie and Stross novels. I can even see why this might be true. But projecting your own tastes onto the population as a whole is risky, and when feedback tells you that the two don't match and you still persist in doing so, it's a sign of cognitive dissonance.) [3]

[1]This is actually probably the most important takeaway from the entire exercise, although it's so big and obvious that any glance at bestseller lists would confirm it.

A quick scan of Twentieth Century bestsellers will show a mid-century pattern whereby some bestselling novels generate later films (e.g. for the 1950's: From Here To Eternity (1951, 1953, film 1953), The Caine Mutiny (1951, 1952, film 1954), The Silver Chalice (1952, 1953, film 1954), The Robe (1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1953, film 1953), Auntie Mame (1955, 1956, play 1956, movie 1958, musical 1966, film of musical 1974), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955, film 1956), Peyton Place (1956, 1957, film 1957, TV 1964-1969), On The Beach (1957, film 1959), Doctor Zhivago (1958, 1959, film 1965), Lolita (1958, 1959, film 1962), Advise and Consent (1959, 1960, film 1962), Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris (1959, TV 1958). Dates are for bestseller status, not date of publication.

With a few exceptions (From Here To Eternity, The Robe, Mrs. 'Arris...) the film appearances do not generate a (major) later bump in readership (I'm sure that in fact every book benefits somewhat when an adaptation comes out, but it's not generally reflected at this level.) The pattern is far more Sydney Carter's "I'm waiting for the film to come": substituting the more accessible film for the less accessible book. Novelizations of works which first appeared as films, if they existed, (the novel of 2001 (not a top 10 bestseller) would be an early instance) never hit the bestseller lists (the only entries I can find are for "ET" (1982), "Return of the Jedi" (1983), and "The Phantom Menace" (1999)).

The newer pattern is of books which sold well when they first came out, but have been pushed into semi-permanent bestsellerdom by TV or cinematic adaptations. (It's not that there aren't other kinds of bestsellers, but this kind and direction of feedback is relatively new.)

To refer to Amazon again: Martin's ASOIAF is at rank 3 for 2014, 10 for 2013, 5 for 2012, 3 for 2011, and not on the list at all for 2010 (the TV series began in 2011). That's out of all books, by the way, not just SFF, as Amazon doesn't break out past bestsellers in fine detail. (Jeff Vandermeer must be hoping for a good adaptation of his Southern Reach Trilogy.)

North America is becoming a less print-driven society and a more "media"-driven society. This is actually a much bigger issue for publishers than the advent of e-books. The workers who used to take books to read on vacation are now as likely to take DVDs, or, more likely, expect to be able to stream video on demand.

The same observation can be made regarding YA series, beginning with Harry Potter, with a book series -> film -> books feedback loop.

[2]I once worked at a second hand bookstore, and am well aware that some customers will read just about anything in a category (e.g. romance, western, space opera, gaming-based fantasy) as long as it meets pretty minimal standards of readability and supplies a similar experience to the last book read. These people made up a good part of our bread and butter -- they would purchase N books a week and return the N books from the previous week -- rather as functional alcoholics provide the core market for the LCBO, accounting for the dominance of cheap just-drinkable product on their shelves. Very low priced e-books and subscription services cater to this market.

[3]That's one reason I reference the LibraryThing figures: there's no obvious skew in favour of fandom per se in their makeup. For the record, there are by my count 19 SF/F books in the top 100 of the collated top five books of 2014 lists; looking at the comments to Torgersen's post, about 3 of these would fall within the ambit of the works which they would aim at promoting (Sanderson, Butcher, and Weir).