As a part of our awards protection, we’ve usually adopted the Goodreads Choice Awards and the Graphic Novel category particularly. It’s a reader chosen award, principally a recognition contest, however typically it’s good to know what’s standard.
For this yr’s awards, nonetheless, Goodreads has determined to shake-up the classes, by including a Romantasy category and REMOVING Children’s & Middle Grade, Poetry, and Graphic Novels.
2023 Goodreads Choice Awards Update
It’s time for our favourite occasion of the yr: the Goodreads Choice Awards! These are the one main guide awards determined by readers, and we will’t wait to search out out which books readers cherished essentially the most in 2023.
Our objective is to have the Goodreads Choice Awards replicate the books which can be hottest with our members, primarily based on the hundreds of thousands of books added, rated, and reviewed on Goodreads annually. As a part of this, now we have made changes to our classes over time. This yr, we’re including a brand new Romantasy category and we won’t embody Children’s & Middle Grade, Poetry, and Graphic Novels, leading to a complete of 15 classes. You can discover the total checklist of this yr’s classes right here.
Those remaining classes are:
Honestly, there doesn’t appear to be a lot rhyme or motive to this. YA Fantasy and SF is a category however…..CHILDREN’S BOOKS AREN’T?
Predictably, this did not go over well on social media:
You can add a category with out deleting others! It’s not pie! https://t.co/GCRkrsnJ1E pic.twitter.com/bTS4LYB5Uj
— Liz 🦎📚 (@LiterateLizard) November 14, 2023
Ire was raised, and social media employees tried to be well mannered.
The lack of variety amongst nominees was additionally cited.
I can’t even fake to be shocked concerning the #GoodreadsChoice awards & its lack of Black romance nominees. IMO on the subject of creating ranges taking part in fields & true equality in publishing that profit Black writers these previous 8 years have been largely performative. pic.twitter.com/3eAO5U5VqS
— Kwana aka Okay.M. Jackson (@KwanaWrites) November 15, 2023
As to why these classes had been eliminated, in accordance to a couple tweets, it has one thing to do with the variety of nominees in every category – and there not being sufficient within the eliminated classes. I can see poetry having a small cadre of devoted nominators, and I assume babies don’t know what Amazon is, however had been graphic novels actually less than code when manga was essentially the most explosively standard guide category over the previous few years?
The Goodreads awards do provide metrics – complete votes! — so I puzzled if GNs lagged there? Last yr’s winner, Heartstopper Vol 4, acquired 138,174 votes out of 318,167 complete votes within the category.
Checking a number of different classes in 2022:
Fiction: Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow – 90,971 votes, 490,873 votes complete
Fantasy: House of Sky and Breath – 105,718 votes, 497,369 votes complete
Nonfiction: Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience – 34,200 votes, 231,426 votes complete
Romance: Book Lovers – 175,857 votes, 616,858 votes complete
Poetry: Call Us What We Carry: Poems – 44,813 votes, 177,181 votes complete
Middle Grade and Childrens: I Am Quiet: A Story for the Introvert in All of Us – 26,266 votes, 193,282 votes complete
As you may see, comics positively held their very own, and are definitely as standard because the outrageously-named Romantasy, which is only a new title for one thing that’s been standard for a number of centuries. Comics had been even shut out of the “Humor” category, which for years in olden instances was the refuge of bestsellers like Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes. But not any extra! Sarah Anderson’s pleasant Sarah’s Scribbles collections gained within the Graphic Novel category a number of instances. Instead, this yr’s Humor category contains issues like Henry Winkler’s autobiography. Eyyyyyyyyyy!
Will the outcry trigger Amazon/Goodreads to vary their minds? Well, everyone knows Amazon doesn’t actually take heed to outcry, or no less than doesn’t react in a short time. So, don’t maintain your breath.
In the meantime, yuck.
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