World Fantasy Award Winners: 2023 Update

 I began the process of tracking sales data for the winners of the World Fantasy Awards in a piecemeal fashion in 2018. The necessities of life have precluded me from doing a real academic level research project, but the results are clear and interesting. 

    The goal was to find actual sales data on the winners of various literary awards to see if these awards did indeed uncover merit in the arts. Sales figures are notoriously hard to get from the publishers themselves; some data could be gained from Publisher's Weekly, but that subscription is limited to the trade, and quite expensive. Amazon rankings are also somewhat interesting, but they don't involve actual units. Making blurbs of Amazon rankings is de rigueur in the publishing industry today, but when selling three or four copies of a book launches it from two-million to two-thousandth place, the data is not very helpful. Again, the publishers themselves are getting actual data, but are not letting it out. The one place I was able to find publicly available hard sales data was the Ebay "sold items" tab. Here you get sales from the last 90 days, and the value of those sales. 

    So, the methodology was to pull two bits of critical data from Ebay: sales unites and the value of the Top 10 most expensive books sold by an author. The number of units indicates the popularity, and to some extent the cultural reach of an author, and the value of the top items would reveal the collectible value of that author, and give some indication of literary value. 

    For example, the most collected author on Ebay is Stephen King. In the second quarter of 2023, he sold over 21,000 units of books, and his top 10 most expensive sales added up to $35,091. Probably the second most collected author would be Shakespeare, with 7,200 units and $17,015 in Top 10 most expensive sales. I wish I had had this information when I briefly owned a bookstore - I would have carried much more Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin, Shakespeare and King books. 

    The World Fantasy Awards are interesting in that they have in practice fully jettisoned straight, white males from their award eligibility. The last white male to win the award was David Mitchell in 2015 for Cloud Atlas, and before that China Mieville in 2010. 

    The Best Sellers of former World Fantasy Award winners by units for Q2 2023 are: 

1.) Michael Moorcock -1,200 units

2.) Ursula Le Guin - 1,100 units 

3.) Haruki Murakami - 1,100 units

4.) Peter Straub - 925 units

5.) Dan Simmons - 765 units

6.) Robert McCammon - 649 units

7.) Jack Vance - 629 units

8.) Richard Matheson - 568 units

9.) Gene Wolfe - 474 units

10.) Fritz Leiber - 361 units

So, in the top 10, 8 of 10 are straight white males, 1 straight white female, and 1 straight Asian. In terms of collectibles here are the top 10 of Q2 2023:

1.) Gene Wolfe - $10,303 (i. e., sold 10 books at $1,000 apiece)

2.) Jack Vance - $7,449

3.) Michael Moorcock - $6,944

4.) Dan Simmons - $6,651

5.) Robert McCammon - $5,621

6.) Haruki Murakami - $4,629

7.) Richard Matheson - $4,571

8.) Ursula Le Guin - $3,771

9.) Fonda Lee - $3,578

10.) Fritz Leiber - $3,559

I've read all of these authors except Fonda Lee, who is a newer winner. 7 of the top 10 are straight white males, 2 straight asians, 1 straight white female. In the 47 years of the WFA, the best "predictions" of the WFA for authors are Gene Wolfe and Dan Simmons, both awarded early in their publishing careers; also David Mitchell and China Mieville are the best sellers of the last 20 years, and possibly Fonda Lee.

The more recent politically-correct WFA winning authors have units and sales as follows:

Sofia Samatar 2014 - 8 units, $102 (black female)

David Mitchell 2015 - 412 units, $1611 (white male)

Anna Smaill 2016 - 0 units, $0 (white female)

Claire North 2017 - 55 units, $174 (white female)

Fonda Lee 2018 - 93 units, $3,578 (asian female)

Victor Lavalle 2018 - 68 units, $224 (black male)

C.L. Polk 2019 - 13 units, $78 (black trans)

Kacen Callender 2020 - 0 units, $0 (black trans)

Alaya Johnson 2021  - 4 units, $34 (black female)

Tasha Suri 2022  - 35 units, $365 (indian female)

    The point of the research is not so much to glorify "straight, white males" as the greats of literature, but simply to point out that the award process is not organic and not rewarding either popularity or skill. The awards should be cancelled at this point, as they are not providing a guide to useful literature. The organizers should re-tool and call their award show, the "trans fiction" awards or similar. That would actually be more helpful. What happens here, and with the Hugos, Nebulas, etc., is they are generally awarding people of color or queerness, which is fine, but call it the "queer" award, not the general excellence award. In other words, the Tiptree awards should be cancelled and combined with the "The Hugos" into one award. What use is a gay award like the Tiptree, and another gay award like the Hugo? Every group should have their own award, the Tiptree/WFA/Hugo for gays, and create a "Lovecraft" or "Heinlein" for straight Whites. Everyone would be happier being ghettoized rather than the dishonest and racist marketing engaged in by the current system. Competing fairly produced female writers and writers of color far superior to today's authors: Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, and Samuel R. Delaney, but even here there is a bit of the bad taste of affirmative action. I would say Ishmael Reed is far superior to Delaney, but never got a fair shake from the gay lobby in science fiction.


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