The Perils of Prizes: How Book Awards and Review Culture Can Mislead Readers

Updated Oct 2026: this editorial has been rewritten and now cites its sources.

Book prizes and online review culture exist to help readers find good books. Both can also distort the very picture they are supposed to clarify. Those distortions are not hypothetical. Research by Balázs Kovács and Amanda Sharkey has measured how winning a prize changes reader ratings, a publisher has canceled a debut over fake reviews, and US regulators have written a rule against review fraud. This editorial examines those cases and argues that the remedy is not to abandon prizes or reviews but to read them with a clear understanding of how they can mislead.

When a prize changes the reading

The most rigorous evidence on prizes comes from a study by Balázs Kovács and Amanda Sharkey. Comparing award winners with books that were shortlisted for the same awards but lost, they found that the winners' average ratings on Goodreads fell faster after the award. Harvard Business Review's summary called this the price of popularity.

The mechanism the authors propose is a simple one. A prize carries a book to readers who would not otherwise have chosen it. Some of those readers are a poor match for the book and rate it accordingly. In other words, the prize does not only reward a book. It changes who reads it, and that in turn changes how the book appears to be received.

For readers, the practical implication is that a falling rating after an award does not necessarily mean the judges were wrong. It may simply mean the book reached people outside its natural audience.

When the process becomes the headline

A prize's credibility also depends on its process. In 2019 the Booker judges chose two winners, Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo, despite a rule in place since 1992 that the prize "may not be divided or withheld". The Guardian reported criticism that the first Black woman to win the prize had to share it. Whatever the merits of the judges' reasoning, the coverage turned toward the rules and away from the novels.

The Booker is not alone in this. In 2012 the Pulitzer board gave no fiction prize for the first time since 1977, after none of the jury's three finalists, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, Karen Russell's Swamplandia! and David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, won a majority of the board's votes. The jury chair, Susan Larson, told NPR: "We were all shocked. We were angry, and we were very disappointed." She also said that the board's deliberations are confidential and it gives the jury no feedback. In 2018 the Swedish Academy postponed the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing "the reduced public confidence in the Academy," and said it would tighten its routines on conflicts of interest and on information classified as secret. The Nobel Foundation, backing the postponement, said an exception can be justified when a prize-awarding institution faces a situation "so serious that a prize decision will not be perceived as credible," and called for reforms "characterised by greater openness towards the outside world." In each case, the institution's process, not the books, became the story.

When reviews are manufactured

Review culture carries its own, more direct, vulnerability. In December 2023 Del Rey, a Penguin Random House imprint, removed Cait Corrain's debut from its schedule after she admitted creating fake Goodreads accounts that boosted her own book's rating and posted negative ratings of other debut authors. In her own words, quoted by the Guardian, she "boosted the rating of my book, bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors, and left reviews that ranged from kind of mean to downright abusive." NPR reported that Goodreads removed the fake reviews, and that in a statement the previous month it had said it would step up efforts to detect review-bombing.

Regulators have acted as well. The Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, effective 21 October 2024, prohibits businesses from creating, buying or selling fake reviews, including reviews that misrepresent that the reviewer exists, and from buying positive or negative reviews.

When an award is for sale

A different problem affects some fee-based contests. The Alliance of Independent Authors maintains ratings of awards and contests for self-published authors, assessing fees, judging and transparency. The very existence of such a watchdog list reflects a real concern: an award whose main product is its entry fee gives authors a sticker but little recognition from readers.

Reading the signals well

None of this means prizes and reviews lack value. It means each signal carries information that has to be interpreted:

• A prize tells readers that a panel of judges admired a book. It does not predict whether any particular reader will.
• A rating reflects who has read the book, and a prize can change that.
• A sudden swing in reviews, especially around a launch, may reflect manipulation rather than reading.
• An award sticker is only as meaningful as the award behind it.

For publishers and authors, the same points suggest responsibilities. Entering credible awards, avoiding fee-driven ones that offer little, and encouraging honest reviews rather than manufactured ones all protect the signals that readers depend on.

The value worth protecting

Prizes and reviews endure because readers need help choosing among an enormous number of books. The cases above show how that help can be distorted, by the shifting audience a prize creates, by disputed processes and by outright fraud. They also show the corrections: research that explains the effects, publishers who act when fraud is admitted, platforms that remove fake reviews and regulators who set rules. Literary value is best served by keeping those corrections in place.

Further reading on digital publishing is collected at Amazon.com/LetsGetDigital.