Winning a major literary prize can move thousands of copies within a day, or it can barely move the needle at all. The New York Times found no easy explanation for which one a book gets.
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In Britain, the jump in sales a Booker Prize nomination can bring became known as “the Booker bounce.”
What a bounce can look like
When E. Annie Proulx won the US National Book Award for fiction in 1993 for “The Shipping News,” her publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, went back to press for 25,000 more copies within a day of the announcement. The book had started out that spring with a print run of just under 20,000 copies, so the reprint alone outsized the original run.
The distributor Ingram saw demand jump from around 100 copies a month to 8,400 in the month after the award, and the book went out of stock because the publisher could not print fast enough. Not all of that demand was real. Susie Russenberger, director of trade books at Ingram, said some of it was false, because many of the orders were repeats. Proulx herself said the awards brought fatter royalty checks, more fan mail, and a rush of speaking engagements. The National Book Award itself carried a $10,000 check.
Bookshops responded too. Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books and Books in Miami, said the title went from “fairly slow sales to brisk sales” once the store built a display around the award.
What a non-bounce looks like
The same prize, in other years, did far less. When Bob Shacochis won the National Book Award for fiction in 1985 for “Easy in the Islands,” Scribner’s publisher Barbara Grossman said sales “in hard cover and paperback” were “negligible,” even though the win still brought prestige and literary acclaim. A prize can also add to momentum a book already has. Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses” was already selling quite well when it won the year before Proulx, and the award helped even more.
Geography complicates the picture further for a prize that now draws entrants from more than one country. Since the Booker widened eligibility to any novel published in English in the UK from 2014, two American authors have won it: Paul Beatty for “The Sellout” in 2016 and George Saunders for “Lincoln in the Bardo” the following year. Non-American winners typically gain exposure and sales in the US market once they win. A winner who is already American does not reliably see the same lift at home.
The money behind the headline
Julian Barnes, who won in 2011 after three earlier nominations, once called the Booker “posh bingo”. The Booker’s own prize fund has grown alongside its reputation. It began at £5,000 when the prize launched in 1969. By 1978 it had grown to £10,000, and the winner now takes home £50,000. Each shortlisted author gets £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their own book.
The bounce was not automatic even for the Booker in its own early years. A lack of press attention caused early jitters among its sponsors. Scandal and controversy among judges and authors soon drew attention to the prize.
What decides it
No source claims to know exactly why one winner catches fire and another does not. The New York Times compared it to bestsellers in general: there are no clear formulas for why a book sells or does not. The record does show some patterns. A book already selling well can get a further push. Bookshop displays and distributor orders can turn an award into demand.
