From BookRiot:
It’s that time of year for everyone to start releasing their “Best Of” lists. Here at Book Riot, we love seeing what other publications choose for the best books of the year.
Yesterday, Amazon released their picks for the best books of 2020. The list, selected by Amazon editors, includes a total of 100 titles from a wide range of genres, including biography and memoir, literature and fiction, mystery and thriller, children’s, science, and more.
. . . .
According to an insider peek from the Amazon Book Review, the majority of the year’s Best Of picks come from Amazon’s Best of the Month series. Editors collect these selections in October and consider any upcoming titles before voting on the best of the year. Many of the books selected are bestsellers, but editors try to include lesser-known titles as well.
Link to the rest at BookRiot
OK, this exemplifies something that really… wait a minute, need to come up with a family-friendly description… irritates the [insert long string of family-unfriendly expletives here] out of me.
If it’s not actually the end of 2020, you have no [longer, internet-breaking string of family unfriendly expletives] business proclaiming what is “the best” of it… if only because in the modern publishing environment, which includes e-books that aren’t coming from “traditional sources” (and has included “small publishers with limited publicity mechanisms and advance-notice budgets”* for a lot longer), not everything is known or out yet. And we won’t even start on the intellectual dishonesty — like the Oscars, to name one excrutiatingly obvious example — of proclaiming “Best of [period]” before those who might criticize those choices have had a chance to obtain, let alone think about, the material in question.
I have a simple rule: I refuse to engage in “best of” speculation, proclamation, or marketing-masquerading-as-evaluation unless and until everything eligible is available to the actual paying audience. Doing so probably violates the Lanham Act, although admittedly it’s an issue that is usually either completely evaded or characterized as “mere puffery.” Plus, I sort of like to review novels that have been proofread, instead of proofs/galleys… and nonfiction, when fact-checking is still underway, is right out.
* I have one client right now whose book is A Thing. Her publisher did not provide copies early enough for her to make “Best of 2018” lists, because here publisher doesn’t play some of those NYC-centric games (being located elsewhere). More fools the listmakers.
I share your irritation. I am particularly irritated by Amazon getting in on the act: they are supposed to be all about data and algorithms, not the subjective views of a bunch of their editors. Maybe though they have data proving it sells more books, which would be all the justification they need?
I actually looked at the top 20 Kindle books and was depressed by the fact that these editors are still totally in thrall to the Big 5 publishers (19 of the titles) and even the odd case out was a traditional publisher (but not Big 5 so called independent). I can’t say that I was greatly impressed by the choice of books, and I was even less impressed by the prices they expected me to pay for a bunch of data files.