The Down Side of Literary Prizes: Winners May Get Tougher Reviews

Seems counter-intuitive, but one study reported in The Guardian today shows that prize winning books frequently are more criticized after the awards than they were when they were simply nominated.

Researchers Amanda Sharkey and Balázs Kovács compared  32 pairs of books that had either won big in th UK or the US, and found that Goodreads reviews plummeted afterwards.  This is "because a book's audience – and thus the personal tastes of its readers – increases considerably after a prize win, so "a larger sampling of readers is drawn to a prize-winning book, not because of any intrinsic personal interest in the book, but because it has an award attached to it".

What the study doesn't note is whether there were increases in sales between the nominations and the winning of the prizes.  One publisher I know says that there are very few things that increase sales of books these days, and winning a major prize is one of them. 

So the question arises: is it worse to have more criticism from people who have bought and read a book than not to have the book bought at all?

I'd say that I'd rather have the sales!