Skip to main content

Vote for us!

I was slightly shocked to receive an email from a major publisher canvassing votes for one of their titles, which was entered for the Galaxy British Book Awards. This set of prizes seems to be the book equivalent of one of those 'people's choice' TV awards - the voting is done by the general public, and the shortlist is mostly celebrity vehicles or TV endorsed fiction. There was even a separate category just for the Richard & Judy bookclub selections.

I suppose I shouldn't have been shocked by this attempt to drum up votes. There's a long tradition of advertising to encourage people to vote one way or another, and this was just direct email advertising. But somehow it doesn't seem the sort of thing book people do. Not us, you know?

I duly clicked through and voted for a competitor to the book being pushed. As it happens both were from the same publisher (I'd be furious if I were the other person and found out that book A was being promoted above mine) - but my choice wasn't spite. It was simply because I'd read the book I voted for and enjoyed it, where I could never imagine reading the book I was being canvassed to support.

Here's the link for the book awards - have your say in an unbiassed way (of course if I had a book in there, it'd be different...), and you even get the chance to win £200 of book vouchers. Can't be bad.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Maxine Clarke25 March 2009 at 15:57

    I've had a few emails from publishers about this, too. Similarly for other awards. I suppose it is the name of the game, these days.

    Whenever I go to these lists, I find I am lucky if I have read even one book in the various categories. So that's an interesting dilemma - should one vote if one has only actually read one of the books, as one cannot compare it against the others?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...
118 comments
Read more

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...
25 comments
Read more