Posted by Eugene Volokh: Why Don't Bookstores Routinely Post Listings of Award Winners?
Why don't bookstores routinely post listings of award winners -- Hugos and Nebulas for science fiction, Edgars for detective stories, and so on? You'd think that this would help sell books, since they give potential buyers something they could try, with some likelihood that the book would indeed be good. True, some subsequent editions of a book indicate that the book won an award, and many books by award-winning authors note this; but to see that, one has to have come across the book in the first place. A list would help readers who don't even know which books to look at. I hear a few bookstores do post such lists, at least for some categories, but why isn't this standard operating procedure in the trade? Just take a list and stick it to the proper bookshelf. You don't have to mark the places where each winner sits on the bookshelf, which will require you to move each marker when the shelves are rearranged. Simply put up the lists and then update them each year (and if you forget one year, it's no disaster). Even amazon, which once had the lists easily available (I discovered Lois McMaster Bujold, one of my favorite SF writers, through an amazon link to the Hugo winners) no longer seems to provide them. I just don't see why bookstores are missing what strikes me as a great sales-boosting tool. _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [email protected] http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
