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| Hearsay: |
Apparently it boils down to money.
The Nobel brings with it buckets of money, whereas for the Pulitzer, all the winner gets is a certificate, dinner and a $10,000 honorarium that's a drop in the bucket compared with the Nobel's million-dollar-plus cash prize. When I was a finalist, I got a letter, two sentences long, on Columbia University stationery (no certificate, no dinner), but on every subsequent novel I write, my publishers can print "Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize" under my name on the cover. And guess what? This sells books (if only a couple).
The National Book Award is regarded by many as the mother of the homegrown prizes. Nominees in four categories are chosen by panels of their peers (novelists judge novelists), cash is awarded, and the nominated books get nifty silver decals, which sell more books.
Mon…ney? What is this "mon-ney" of which you speak? Is this the same as that dirty paper and metal discs they give you for selling the hours of your life at a dayjob that you can exchange for the bare essentials of shelter and sustenance? Surely no one gets "mon-ney" for writing a book… What a world we live in.
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November 29th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
But with every prize your market value increases in regad to jobs from papers, magazines and so on. There is some Mon…ney there, isn’t it? At least in Germany.
November 29th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
True, but I’m just speaking facetiously on behalf of the mid-list authors, short story writers, and poets of the world, Konrad. :)
November 29th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
I dunno, G, I had a drink with Mark Strand a few months ago–by which I mean I tagged along with a group of people following a reading given by Mark Strand and had the good fortune to sit next to him–and I don’t get the impression he’s shy on mon-ney. Tho I guess you could dismiss this as the exception that proves the rule. He’s from PEI, by the way…
November 29th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
Do you think he made his money selling poems, Z? How sweet! A naïve idealist. Don’t see many of those these days.
November 29th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Ha! No, not directly, but the poems are the foundation upon which a good deal of his income is built. Which is how such things work. It costs thousands to book Mark Strand for a one-hour reading–because he’s a famous poet. On a much smaller scale, I get a decent chunk of my annual income, such as it is, from poetry, but very little from the sale of individual poems to magazines or of books to readers. But I wouldn’t get that other money, or would get less of it, or have a harder time getting it, if I didn’t also write the poems. I was talking to an older poet the other day who told me he’s getting tens of thousands for the sale of his papers to a university–which he wouldn’t get if he hadn’t written the poems. And prestigious awards, as Konrad suggests, even if they’re not tremendously lucrative themselves, make it that much easier for writers to make money through other means.