Book Blogger Appreciation Week: The New Version

The folks running Book Blogger Appreciation Week have announced dates for this year, and some changes to how they are run. This year it’s September 13th through the 17th.

Now, as you may recall, last year I had a bit of criticism on this blog about B.B.A.W. I didn’t like that people paid to promote books would be eligible. I’m less critical of B.B.A.W. for that than I am the bloggers themselves who surreptitiously take money. I also criticized B.B.A.W. on twitter for allowing the organizers themselves to be eligible for awards. That really irked me. Particularly on the latter, I was not the only negative Nancy.

It looks like the organizers have taken the criticism to heart. They’ve made some changes for this year. First, their executive committee is not eligible for awards this year. This is excellent! They’ve also disqualified paid bloggers. Also good! And the process is much more transparent this year. Last year, most stuff for the awards part happened behind the scenes, and magically they came out where a large portion of the nominations were to people running the awards. 40% of the blogs on shortlists were run by people on committees running B.B.A.W. I don’t think that was intentional, but there’s a tendency to groupthink when a group does stuff in a cloistered fashion.

The process this year is much more out in the open. Bloggers have to nominate themselves by posting. The longlist is voted publicly.¹ The shortlist is done privately. And the final voting for winners is done publicly. I think there will a lot less of the perception that B.B.A.W. is a mutual appreciation society than last year.

I have two concerns though. First relates back to my criticisms last year. The official response was that there was nothing B.B.A.W. could do since they hadn’t originally specified no paid flacks in the rules, so they couldn’t do anything at that point. At this point, B.B.A.W. has taken into account past criticisms, but I don’t see that they’ve looked ahead as much. The Executive Committee, to my knowledge, doesn’t have anyone on it that has experience running a decent sized award, which would give them insight on how to deal with unforeseen issues. So if something else comes up, I’m worried that they won’t do the right thing because they feel constrained by a lack of a rule to deal with the issue. For instance, nothing in the rules prohibits ballot-stuffing using automated scripts. If someone were to attempt that, I would hope that the organizers don’t feel they aren’t allowed by their own rules to disallow this.

The second concern is more philosophical. The blogging world of books has many loci. B.B.A.W. (overall, not just the awards) really only covers one locus. I see all sorts of different styles of blogging about books out there, many of which are extremely awesome. But they will never get recognized in B.B.A.W. because their communities do not intersect with B.B.A.W. For examples of things that won’t get recognition, I’m thinking places like Three Percent, Conversational Reading, Asking the Wrong Questions, The Mumpsimus, S.F. Signal, Feminist S.F. The Blog!, and many others. I don’t foresee the new process helping matters in that respect. It requires too much opt-in to get past people’s inertia. Voting requires registration. Eligibility requires a public blog post nominating one’s self. For people already part of the group, this is a no-brainer. People not part of this have a barrier to entry.

As kind of an example of what I mean by this, the book blog year in review post on the B.B.A.W. blog failed to mention RaceFail. That’s no fault of Raych, who wrote the post and is generally awesome. It’s not something that I would expect her to notice. But in science fiction land, that was huge! B.B.A.W. is currently by, for, and about only a segment of book blogging.

I sometimes get the feeling that the organizers want to involve all book blogs. And sometimes I get the feeling that they are content with the more narrow community-oriented² book blog. I’m not sure which way they really want to go. There’s no requirement that this group involve the whole wide world of book blogs. Lots of organizations are more about serving their own members than going big. S.F.W.A. doesn’t promote crime fiction writers, for instance.

But I really would like to see some group step up and advocate for all literary blogs. I think the democratization of literary opinion via blogs has the possibility of doing something amazing. I’d love to see a Literary New World Order! It’s going to happen regardless, but I’d love to see it advocated. Something that recognizes both the commonality and the differences that entails.

Maybe I’ll be proved wrong and the big wide book blogging world will embrace B.B.A.W. as it is. For the moment, I’m going to sit it out. That is because I want to see a track record of success first, after the fail that surrounded last year’s edition. I want to see a successful awards. But more importantly, I want to see that it includes and recognizes (not just with the awards) a much broader book blogging ideal. If it does, I’ll be in next year. (And by that, I do not mean the awards. Any group that thinks this blog deserves an award is crazy! Even in a most grumpy kind of category, Ed Champion oughta kick my ass.)