The BSFA shortlists are out! And my own nominations were not particularly in tune with those of other voters; I voted for two of the shortlisted books for younger readers, one each in the artwork, long-non-fiction, and short fiction categories, and none of the successful nominees in the novel, short non-fiction and shorter fiction categories (I didn’t vote in the rest). So it goes.
As usual, I’ll look at the ranking of the shortlisted books on Goodreads, LibraryThing and (new) StoryGraph, comparing also with my similar analysis of the long lists. I do this not to predict winners, but to assess the extent to which each book (of those which have been published individually as standalone volumes) is notable, to the extent that they have penetrated the market of GR / LT / SG readers.
(I have done this every year for a number of years; since the BSFA Award categories were increased in number, see 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.)
I’m taking this in descending order of the popularity of the top nominee in each category. None of the finalists in Best Audio Fiction, Best Artwork, Best Short Fiction or Best Non-Fiction (Short) has been logged on any of the three websites, which is not surprising. I note that the shortlist for Best Audio Fiction includes both a series and a single story from that series.
Best Fiction for Younger Readers
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviewers |
| Sunrise on the Reaping | Suzanne Collins | 1,105,150 | 4,625 | 171,448 |
| Secrets of the First School | T. L. Huchu | 348 | 34 | 96 |
| Doctor Who: Lux | James Goss | 69 | 23 | 14 |
| Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution | Una McCormack | 49 | 23 | 11 |
| The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel | Jendia Gammon writing as J. Dianne Dotson | 4 | 0 | 0 |
(ranks of the 17 books on the long list that I analysed: 1st, 8th, 10th, 12th, 16th)
Sunrise on the Reaping has more owners / raters / reviewers on the three websites than all of the other books in this post put together.
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel is one of several books that has made it to the shortlist despite not having a massive pickup on the ownership sites.
I am really puzzled by The Ghost Merchant, by Rick Danforth, which is also shortlisted in this category. When I did this analysis for the long-lists, I recorded that it had 72 ratings on Goodreads, 1 owner on LibraryThing and 24 reviewers on StoryGraph. Now I can’t find anyone listing it on any of the systems. It’s part of a larger publication, The Colored Lens, but it doesn’t have a lot of ratings either. It’s almost certainly my own mistake, but a strange one for me to have made.
Incidentally Rick Danforth has five short-listed works across four categories. Nobody else has more than three.
Best Shorter Fiction
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviewers |
| The River Has Roots | Amal El-Mohtar | 39,893 | 347 | 17,074 |
| Cities are Forests Waiting to Happen | Cecile Cristofari | 3 | 2 | 0 |
(ranks of the 32 long-listees that I analysed: 1st and 28th)
Only two of the five finalists have been published as standalone volumes, and only one of those has made much of an impact – but what an impact! Leaving aside Sunrise on the Reaping from the previous category, The River Has Roots has more owners / raters / reviewers on the three websites than all of the other books in this post put together.
Best Collection
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviewers |
| The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories | ed. Andre M. Carrington | 84 | 40 | 54 |
| Uncertain Sons and Other Stories | Thomas Ha | 135 | 15 | 27 |
| Who Will You Save? | Gareth . L Powell | 28 | 6 | 8 |
| Blood in the Bricks | Neil Williamson | 7 | 16 | 2 |
| Black Friday | Cheryl S. Ntumy | 6 | 6 | 2 |
| Creative Futures: Beyond and Within | ed. Allen Stroud | 4 | 3 | 2 |
(ranks among the 41 long-listees that I analysed: 9th, 11th, 15th, 18th, 23rd, 25th)
A bit more of a spread here, with the winner on Goodreads coming in second on StoryGraph and third on LibraryThing. The top two books are in the same zone as the top two finalists for Best Novel.
Best Novel
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviewers |
| When There Are Wolves Again | E. J. Swift | 163 | 16 | 40 |
| Project Hanuman | Stewart Hotston | 78 | 23 | 31 |
| A Granite Silence | Nina Allan | 56 | 9 | 11 |
| The Salt Oracle | Lorraine Wilson | 36 | 3 | 19 |
| Edge of Oblivion | Kirk Weddell | 8 | 0 | 0 |
(ranks among the 82 novels on the long-list by my analysis: 59th, 58th, 66th, 70th, and 81st; all of the finalists were in the lowest third of the popularity rankings of the long-list.)
Again, there is a nominee on the ballot which has failed to make a mark with the users of two of the three book ownership sites.
Also I think that the Chair of the BSFA ought to recuse themselves from the awards, or perhaps even be barred by the rules. It is risky for them and for the awards. It’s not so long since the British Fantasy Award scandal. I am not in any way alleging misconduct, I am expressing an opinion about good practice. I expressed this view previously in private to the previous BSFA Chair, and now I am expressing it in public.
Best Non-fiction (long)
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviewers |
| Fantasy: A Short History | Adam Roberts | 17 | 12 | 3 |
| Writing the Magic | Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst | 8 | 5 | 2 |
| Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction | Paul Kincaid | 6 | 5 | 0 |
| That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American With Film | Payton McCarty-Simas | 5 | 0 | 4 |
| Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre | Joy Sanchez-Taylor | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914 | Kate Holterhoff | 0 | 0 | 0 |
(ranks among the 18 books on the long-list, by my analysis: 6th, 8th, 10th, 11th, 15th and joint last)
These are low numbers, and none of those who voted for Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914 seems to have logged it on Goodreads or LibraryThing, let alone StoryGraph, whose users seem uninterested in academic literary analysis in general.
I found Kindle prices on Amazon.com for sixteen of the 23 books listed in all the tables above (I didn’t check the three that I already own). Speculation and the Darwinian Method is the most expensive by far – Amazon gives me a price of $59 for the Kindle edition, more than twice the cost of any of the others. At 203 pages, that’s 3.5 pages per dollar. Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre is the second most expensive, both in absolute price and in value for length, $27 for 187 pages, 6.8 pages to the dollar.
At the other end of the scale, the Kindle edition of A Granite Silence by Nina Allan costs $4.52 for 350 pages, 74 pages per dollar, more than twenty times better value than Speculation and the Darwinian Method and ten times better than Dispelling Fantasies. (The median is 31 pages per dollar.)
Again, I am not suggesting malfeasance in any way. I have no reason to suppose that the rules have not been applied. But I think these numbers are a problem for the BSFA Awards. Do they, or should they, reflect the wider judgement of the BSFA membership and Eastercon community, let alone British SFF readers as a whole, about notability? Several of the books listed above objectively fail the notability test of measurable visibility on three popular library sites. If it becomes too easy to get your work on the ballot, the value of the award itself is diminished.
I don’t know to what extent the solution might be a change in marketing, a change to the rules or both. But that is a secondary question; if the BSFA does not think that there is in fact a problem, no action need be taken anyway.
One more data point. I am in London at the moment, for PicoCon today and work stuff on Monday. I popped into the Waterstone’s on Trafalgar Square yesterday, and could not find a single one of the books listed above on the shelves, not even the Suzanne Collins. It’s only one shop, of course, and the SFF section is not huge, and maybe they had all been bought after the announcement last week. I hope so.