DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot. Part 2 of 7: The Awards Racket

When a reader walks into a bookstore, whether it’s the last chain in a suburban mall or a dusty used shop on Main Street, there’s one thing guaranteed to catch the eye: the shiny badge on the front of a book. “Winner of the National Book Award.” “Pulitzer Prize Finalist.” “Hugo Award Winner.” These aren’t just decorative stickers. They are signals — shorthand for quality, prestige, and trust. Readers assume that someone, somewhere, has done the hard work of sifting through thousands of titles to find the ones that rise above the rest. The badge says: This one is worth your time. This one has been judged excellent.

That promise is powerful. For decades, an award could launch a book into immortality. A Pulitzer winner would land on school syllabi. A Booker Prize title would suddenly be translated into dozens of languages. A Hugo or Nebula would send sales surging in the insular but passionate science fiction and fantasy community. The little sticker on the cover could mean the difference between obscurity and a career. And those stickers didn’t just mean book sales — they meant Hollywood attention. When studios and producers scan the market for new properties to adapt, they look first at the books with awards attached. The badge could open the door to film rights, merchandising, and cultural immortality.

But here’s the truth: those badges often, perhaps usually, do not indicate excellence — at least not those awarded in the current era. Instead, they mean that the content has been approved by ideological judges, or that someone was able to pack the voting process, or even that the publisher had the best party at a convention. Insider-approved authors on awards committees trade trophies with one another, ensuring newcomers and outsiders are shut out. And awards once prestigious become the punchlines of jokes, silver and gold stickers as meaningless as a kindergartener’s pretty gold star.

The Sad Puppies Revolt

The curtain first slipped in a corner of the literary world not usually noticed by the mainstream press: science fiction and fantasy. For decades, the Hugo Awards had been the crown jewel of the genre. To win a Hugo was to be forever enshrined among the giants — Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Le Guin. The award carried weight not just with fans but with publishers, who would reprint and promote winners for years.

But by the early 2010s, fans began noticing a shift. The Hugo shortlists looked less like celebrations of imagination and more like showcases of political themes. Message fiction was in. Adventures, space operas, and swashbuckling tales that had defined the genre were out. Even more suspicious, despite the dozens of science fiction and fantasy imprints on the market, the awards became dominated by one house: Tor Books. Time and again, Tor authors were shortlisted and Tor authors walked away with the rockets. To many, it looked less like a free contest of ideas and more like a closed shop.

A group of writers and fans, frustrated by this creeping politicization and consolidation, decided to push back. They called themselves the Sad Puppies — a tongue-in-cheek name coined by Larry Correia, later joined by Sarah Hoyt and Brad Torgersen. Their goal was simple: highlight good, entertaining stories that regular readers actually enjoyed, but that the self-appointed gatekeepers were ignoring. They organized campaigns to put overlooked works on the ballot, rallying fans to participate in the open nomination process.

The establishment’s response was swift and vicious. Rather than celebrate fan enthusiasm, the insiders branded Sad Puppies as bigots and reactionaries. The truth was far less sinister: most of those involved leaned right-of-center politically, and had already been quietly shut out of mainstream publishing because of those views. Their rebellion was not about imposing an ideology, but about asking for a seat at the table — a chance for stories of adventure, heroism, and wonder to stand on equal footing. Instead, committees coordinated block votes of “No Award” to ensure that nominated works — many by women, minorities, or small-press authors — would be denied a trophy simply because they weren’t part of the Tor-approved club. The message was unmistakable: awards were not about readers or stories, but about who controlled the machinery. The rocket ship had become a political weapon, and anyone outside the circle was collateral damage.

The Checklist Era

What began in science fiction did not stay there. As the 2010s wore on, nearly every major literary prize began to bend toward the same formula. It was no longer enough for a book to be well-written, imaginative, or beloved by readers. To be considered prize-worthy, it had to check the right boxes: the author’s identity, the characters’ demographics, and the themes of oppression and representation.

Prize committees formalized what the Hugos had shown informally — literature was to serve ideology first. Some awards now openly require “diversity statements” or mandate representation quotas on their juries and shortlists. Others may not spell it out, but the results are obvious: story takes a back seat to politics, and readers learn to expect that a prizewinner will teach them a lesson before it entertains them.

The result is a narrowing of literature itself. Whole genres — thrillers, adventure tales, epic fantasy, military science fiction — find themselves locked out. Conservative and right-leaning authors are invisible by design, their very existence treated as an embarrassment. And the readers who once trusted those shiny badges come to see them not as markers of excellence, but as warning labels: This book is safe, approved, and predictable.

The Consequences

The capture of awards by ideology has not gone unnoticed. Readers are voting with their feet. A prize sticker that once boosted sales can now suppress them, signaling to ordinary buyers that the book is less about story and more about sermon. Bestseller lists are increasingly dominated by genre fiction and independent titles that never touch a prize jury, while award winners often sink without a ripple.

Even the judges themselves sometimes let slip what’s really going on. This year, Roddy Doyle — the Booker Prize–winning novelist who chaired the 2025 Booker Prize jury — admitted that most of the 153 submitted novels “were not worth discussing.” Entire stacks of entries were tossed aside, often without more than a perfunctory comment. He described the experience of slogging through two bad books in a row as depressing, saying he had signed up “to read good books.” The complaint is telling: publishing houses are flooding prestigious contests with works that check the right identity or political boxes, but can’t hold up on literary merit. Judges are drowning in mediocrity, and the few “green light” novels stand out only because the rest are so weak.

That reality corrodes the very prestige awards once conferred. If everyone believes the outcome is preordained — whether by politics, publisher clout, or insider gamesmanship — the honor evaporates. Writers who might once have aspired to a Hugo or a Booker no longer bother. Readers no longer trust the shiny gold sticker. And the institutions themselves — the committees, the foundations, the publishers who bankroll the parties — can’t seem to grasp why their influence dwindles.

And lurking beneath it all is a more unsettling question: are books of real merit simply no longer being published, choked out at the acquisitions stage by ideological capture inside publishing houses? Or are the good books still being written, but deliberately kept away from prize committees because publishers no longer recognize what excellence looks like? Either answer is damning. Either way, the pipeline between readers and true literary achievement is broken — and awards have become part of the problem, not the solution.

The Real Badge of Honor

If the awards racket has lost its legitimacy, where does real authority come from? The answer has always been there, even when committees pretended otherwise: the readers. No sticker can compete with the quiet power of word of mouth. Books that endure — books that shape culture — are not the ones that won the right prize, but the ones that people pressed into each other’s hands and said, you have to read this.

Consider Harry Potter. It wasn’t an award darling. It didn’t need to be. It spread like a spark across playgrounds, dinner tables, and office break rooms, until it became the publishing phenomenon of a generation. Sales data tells the truth that juries refuse to face: a book beloved by readers will outlast a dozen prizewinners nobody remembers.

Crowdfunding has become another badge of honor, measured not in stickers, but in dollars that readers who believe in a writer’s vision pledge. Brandon Sanderson’s record-shattering $16 million Kickstarter proved the point: no committee anointed him, no prize jury handed him legitimacy. His readers did — with their wallets.

And beyond sales and fandom lies the deeper cost: the thread of culture itself. Awards once served as part of that thread, carrying forward works to be remembered, taught, and passed down. When those institutions trade continuity for ideology, we lose more than stories. We lose the shared canon that binds us together, the voice that lets a civilization speak across time. And a culture that cannot remember its own voice is a culture that will not last.

The real badge of honor is not a gold sticker from an awards committee cocktail party filled with pretentious and self-important professionals, but the dog-eared copy passed from friend to friend, the story strong enough to win hearts on its own. The Sad Puppies were right to pull back the curtain, but the truth is even larger. Awards no longer guide readers — readers guide each other. And that, in the end, is the healthiest correction of all.