As usual, I have looked at the extent to which the works shortlisted for the Nebula Award (and the related Andre Norton Award) this year have gained traction on the most popular book-logging sites, Goodreads, LibraryThing and StoryGraph. To repeat, 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) has measurably penetrated the wider market.
Best Novel
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| Katabasis | R.F. Kuang | 139,466 | 2,863 | 45,260 |
| The Buffalo Hunter Hunter | Stephen Graham Jones | 47,962 | 1,067 | 15,977 |
| Death of the Author | Nnedi Okorafor | 20,345 | 808 | 7,967 |
| The Incandescent | Emily Tesh | 10,745 | 487 | 4,984 |
| Sour Cherry | Natalia Theodoridou | 3,260 | 118 | 1,288 |
| When We Were Real | Daryl Gregory | 1,653 | 103 | 473 |
| Wearing the Lion | John Wiswell | 1,196 | 88 | 503 |
A consistent pattern with a clear leader, and almost exactly the same ranking across the three systems.
The Kindle edition of Sour Cherry is currently going for $1.99 on Amazon.com (where I buy most of my ebooks). It has 306 pages, so that’s 154 pages per dollar – amazing value. (Skipping ahead, the most expensive books listed here by this measure are The Sloneshore Register, at 8.5 pages per dollar, and The River Has Roots, at 8.9.)
Best Novella
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| The River Has Roots | Amal El-Mohtar | 40,882 | 669 | 17,670 |
| Automatic Noodle | Annalee Newitz | 19,638 | 512 | 8,161 |
| But Not Too Bold | Hache Pueyo | 4,009 | 99 | 1,718 |
| Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle | Renan Bernardo | 81 | 5 | 31 |
| The Death of Mountains | Jordan Kurella | 41 | 10 | 14 |
| “Descent” | Wole Talabi | Not published separately | ||
Again a consistent pattern with a clear leader, if not quite as far ahead as in Best Novel.
Best Novelette
Not surprisingly, only one of the finalists has been separately published.
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| The Name Ziya | Wen-Yi Lee | 63 | 1 | 35 |
None of the short stories or poetry on the ballot has been published separately.
Andre Norton Award
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| Sunrise on the Reaping | Suzanne Collins | 1,122,593 | 4,739 | 174,106 |
| Into the Wild Magic | Michelle Knudsen | 32 | 9 | 5 |
| Wishing Well, Wishing Well | Jubilee Cho | 12 | 5 | 10 |
| The Tower | David Anaxagoras, narrated by Christopher Gebauer | 25 | 1 | 4 |
| Gemini Rising | Jonathan Brazee | 24 | 0 | 0 |
| Goblin Girl | K.A. Mielke | 3 | 0 | 2 |
The top book here has a colossal lead, with more Goodreads raters and StoryGraph reviews than all the other books listed in this post, combined. (Also by far the most owners on LibraryThing, but not quite as dominant as in the other two cases.) The other five nominees have only 15 LibraryThing owners between them. If I ran the Nebulas, I would worry that this category is drifting out of step with popular taste.
Finally, Best Comic
| Helen of Wyndhorn | Tom King | 1,792 | 52 | 386 |
| Strange Bedfellows | Ariel Slamet Ries | 825 | 35 | 580 |
| Fishflies | Jeff Lemire | 571 | 25 | 131 |
| The Flip Side | Jason Walz | 399 | 24 | 138 |
| Carmilla Volume 3: The Eternal | Amy Chu | 111 | 8 | 45 |
| The Stoneshore Register | G. Willow Wilson | 111 | 10 | 32 |
| Second Shift | Kit Anderson | 69 | 9 | 39 |
| Mary Shelley’s School for Monsters, Volume 2: The Killing Stone | Jessica Maison | 0 | 0 | 0 |
The only category where there is a divergence at the top, with StoryGraph users favoring Strange Bedfellows over Helen of Wyndhorn. Also the only category to feature a finalist that is completely invisible on the book sites.
I have been tracking these statistics every year since 2012, and one of these days I shall sit down and see if any lessons can be learned.