Mika Brzezinski, the emcee of last night’s National Book Awards, wasn’t completely off when she quipped, unoriginally, that the ceremony is “the Oscars without money.” But in fact there really was money on the line when fiction winner James McBride climbed the podium in his porkpie hat to give the evening’s final acceptance speech. It wasn’t just the $10,000 prize, the inevitable sales bump, or the investments the publishing industry has made toward “broadening the impact” of an award that hasn’t always lived up to its big name. For the first time in the prize’s 64-year history, the British betting firm Ladbrokes had laid odds on the fiction finalists. (George Saunders had been the favorite.)
There’s nothing accidental about the uptick in global interest, or this year’s inaugural “longlist” of semifinalists, or the host being a talking head from Morning Joe. Nor is it mere serendipity that all five of this year’s nominees, from Thomas Pynchon to Jhumpa Lahiri, have been on best-seller lists, a surprisingly novel development. The National Book Awards has spent the past decade fighting for attention, mainly at the behest of a business that seems to be getting less and less of it — flattened sales, shrunken review space, bookstore displays giving way to Amazon algorithms. “The world is filled with more and more media choices and more and more noise,” says David Steinberger, the CEO of Perseus Books and chair of the NBA board. “One of the main questions is, how many people are paying attention to the awards, and how many people are buying the books?” He’s optimistic, “but I feel like we’ve got a long way to go.”
It wasn’t ever thus. NBA ceremonies once took place at the Waldorf Astoria, hosted John Lindsay and Eleanor Roosevelt, and anointed the likes of Flannery O’Connor and Philip Roth. Then there was a decade in the wilderness. In the doldrums of the late seventies, the National Book Awards became the American Book Awards, expanded the number of categories to as many as 28 per year, and lost the confidence of publishers and readers alike. It was, in the words of Gotham publisher William Shinker, “a disaster.”
The NBA reorganized in 1987, but never quite recovered its cachet. In more recent years, that’s sometimes been blamed on the narrow tastes of its judges, who were exclusively authors. In 2004, a panel led by Rick Moody selected five virtually unknown fiction finalists, four of whom hadn’t broken 1,000 copies in sales and didn’t sell much more afterward. The thrill of discovery is fleeting if the “discovered” author sinks back into oblivion. That year’s handwringers included the NBAs’ own executive director, just-hired Harold Augenbraum, who told the Times, “It is not a perfect process.”
“We’re obsessed with getting more people to read these books,” Augenbraum told me recently. In 2007, he recruited Steinberger to the board, and Steinberger pulled in Grove Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin and the powerful agent Lynn Nesbit. Together, these industry stalwarts orchestrated an insiders’ putsch. They glammed up the ceremony with after-parties, a move from Midtown to Cipriani Wall Street, and guests like Anna Wintour, while behind the scenes they mulled changes in the judging process. Their worries are well articulated by FSG publisher (and non–board member) Jonathan Galassi: “Books have been chosen for all sorts of political reasons that haven’t been focused on the intrinsic readability and central significance of the books themselves.”
As late as 2011, when two of the nominees came from tiny presses, Salon critic Laura Miller was arguing that “already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention.” One of that year’s judges, Victor LaValle, wrote a rejoinder calling her column “just bonkers.” But the board was on Miller’s side, acknowledging a Catch-22: If you want your winners to have an impact, you want to pick winners that … have an impact.
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