Last year, one of our authors was longlisted for a literary prize that I will not name. The longlist announcement generated a brief spike in sales, a few congratulatory emails, and a mention in two trade publications. Then our author was not shortlisted, and that was the end of it. The total financial impact of the longlisting was, by my calculation, about $2,400 in additional revenue. The total cost of the submission process, including entry fees, shipping copies to judges, and staff time spent on the application, was about $1,800. So we netted roughly $600.

I share these numbers not to be bitter (we were genuinely delighted by the longlisting) but because they illustrate something that very few people in the book world talk about openly: the economics of literary prizes are strange, often irrational, and frequently misunderstood by everyone involved.

The Cost of Entering

Most readers do not know that publishers pay to submit books for prizes. This is not common knowledge, and it surprises people when I mention it. Entry fees vary widely. Some prizes charge nothing. The National Book Award charges $160 per title (though there have been periodic adjustments). Many smaller prizes charge between $25 and $100. A few charge significantly more.

The fees themselves are not the expensive part. The expensive part is the physical copies. Most prizes require between three and ten copies of each submitted title. For a hardcover that costs us $4.50 to print, sending eight copies to a prize committee costs $36 in manufacturing plus $15-25 in shipping. Multiply this across twenty or thirty prize submissions per year, which is not unusual for even a small publisher, and you are looking at a meaningful line item in the budget.

Then there is staff time. Someone has to research which prizes are appropriate for which titles. Someone has to fill out the application forms, which range from simple online submissions to elaborate dossiers requiring author biographies, publication histories, and promotional materials. Someone has to track the timelines, because prize deadlines are scattered throughout the year with no coordination between them. Someone has to package and ship the books.

At a large publisher, this work is handled by a dedicated publicity department. At a small press like ours, it is one of approximately forty tasks being handled by a team of five people. The opportunity cost is significant. Every hour spent on prize submissions is an hour not spent on editing, marketing, or acquiring new titles.

I estimate that our total annual spend on prize submissions, including fees, copies, shipping, and staff time, is between $8,000 and $12,000. That is a significant investment for a small publisher. It is roughly equivalent to the advance we might pay for a new title. The question of whether that investment pays off is one I wrestle with every year.

The Winner’s Windfall

The economics change dramatically if you actually win. Winning a major literary prize, the Booker, the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, can increase sales by a factor of ten or more. The “Booker effect” has been studied by economists, and the numbers are striking. A Booker winner typically sees a sales increase of 300-500% in the months following the announcement. A Pulitzer winner can see even larger jumps. These are life-changing numbers for an author and transformative numbers for a publisher.

But here is the catch: the odds of winning are extremely small. The Booker Prize receives roughly 150-170 submissions each year from eligible publishers. The longlist is 13 titles. The shortlist is 6. The winner is 1. Even getting longlisted puts you in the top 8% of submissions. Winning puts you at 0.6%.

For smaller prizes, the odds are sometimes better but the payoff is proportionally smaller. A regional literary prize might receive 50 submissions and award one winner, giving you a 2% chance. But the sales bump from a regional prize might be measured in dozens of copies rather than thousands.

If you think of prize submissions as a form of gambling, which in some ways they are, the expected value calculation is not favorable for most publishers. You spend $8,000-12,000 per year for a small probability of a large payoff. A casino would love those odds. A financial advisor would tell you to invest the money elsewhere.

The Prestige Economy

So why do publishers, including us, keep submitting? The answer is that prizes operate in a prestige economy that is partially decoupled from the financial economy. The value of a prize is not measured entirely in sales. It is measured in reputation, in visibility, in the ability to attract better manuscripts in the future, and in the morale of your team and your authors.

When one of our titles is longlisted for a prize, the financial impact may be modest. But the reputational impact is significant. It tells agents that we are a serious publisher whose books get noticed. It tells booksellers that our titles are worth stocking. It tells readers that our editorial judgment can be trusted. It tells our own team that the work they do is being recognized.

These benefits are real but extremely difficult to quantify. How do you put a dollar value on the manuscript that an agent sends you because they saw your title on a longlist? How do you measure the lifetime value of a bookseller who starts carrying your titles because one of them won a prize? How do you calculate the retention value of a team member who stays because they feel proud of the work?

I do not know the answers to these questions, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims they do. What I know is that the prestige effects of prize recognition compound over time. A publisher with a history of prize-recognized titles has a fundamentally different market position than one without, even if the direct financial impact of any single prize recognition was negligible.

The Hidden Politics

Prizes also have a political dimension that is rarely discussed publicly but is well understood within the industry.

Prize juries are composed of human beings with tastes, biases, and relationships. The judging process is not a blind evaluation of literary merit. Judges know which publishers submitted which books. They have opinions about those publishers. They have relationships with some of the authors under consideration. They have aesthetic preferences that favor certain kinds of writing over others.

None of this is corrupt, exactly. It is just human. But it means that certain publishers have structural advantages in the prize ecosystem. A title from a major publisher with a well-known author and a large publicity budget is more likely to be noticed by judges than a title from a small press, even if the small press title is the better book. Judges are readers, and they are influenced by the same signals that influence all readers: reviews, media coverage, word of mouth, the reputation of the imprint.

I have served on one prize jury (for a small regional award, nothing prestigious) and the experience was eye-opening. The stack of submitted books was enormous. No one on the jury read every submission cover to cover. We all made triage decisions based on first pages, author bios, and publisher reputations. The books that got the fullest readings were the ones that had already accumulated some external validation: strong reviews, a recognizable author name, a publisher known for quality. The books from unknown publishers with no reviews and no blurbs were at a structural disadvantage before the jury opened them.

This is not a complaint. It is simply a description of how the system works. And understanding how the system works is important for publishers making decisions about where to invest their limited prize-submission budgets.

Our Strategy

Given all of this, here is how we approach prize submissions at ScrollWorks.

We are selective about which prizes we target. We do not submit every title to every available prize. Instead, we identify the two or three prizes that are the best fit for each title based on genre, theme, and the aesthetic preferences of recent juries. This means doing our homework: reading the last five years of winners and shortlisted titles to understand what each prize tends to reward. A prize that consistently honors formally experimental fiction is probably not the right venue for a straightforward literary novel, regardless of how good it is.

We invest more heavily in the submission itself than in the entry fees. A thoughtful cover letter that explains why this particular book is right for this particular prize is more valuable than paying the entry fee for five additional prizes. Judges respond to publishers who demonstrate genuine engagement with the prize’s mission and history.

We try to build relationships with the prize ecosystem over time rather than treating each submission as a one-off transaction. This means attending award ceremonies when our titles are recognized, even at the longlist level. It means nominating judges when we are asked for suggestions. It means reviewing and promoting prize-winning books from other publishers. The literary prize world is a community, and being a good citizen of that community pays dividends over time.

We are honest with our authors about the odds. When I tell an author that we are submitting their book for a prize, I also tell them the statistical likelihood of recognition. I do not want them to expect a shortlisting and be crushed when it does not happen. Managing expectations is one of the most important things a publisher can do for an author’s emotional health and long-term career satisfaction.

The Bigger Picture

I think literary prizes perform a genuine service for the reading public. In a world of overwhelming choice, they function as curated recommendations from people who have read deeply and widely. A prize shortlist is, at its best, a list of books that have been tested against rigorous standards by thoughtful readers. That has real value for the ordinary reader trying to decide what to read next.

But I also think the prize system has structural problems that the industry is reluctant to address. The entry fee model transfers cost from the prize organization to the publishers, which disproportionately burdens small presses. The judging process favors books with existing visibility, which reinforces the advantages of large publishers. The winner-take-all dynamic means that the gap between the winner and the shortlisted titles, in terms of sales impact, is enormous, even though the quality difference is often negligible.

Some of these problems have straightforward solutions. Entry fees could be scaled to publisher size. Blind judging, where the publisher’s identity is concealed, could reduce bias. Prizes could share sales data to help publishers make more informed submission decisions. Whether any of these reforms will actually happen is another question. The prize system has powerful incumbents who benefit from the current structure and little incentive to change it.

What Prizes Mean to Authors

I have been talking about prizes primarily from the publisher’s perspective, but I should also say something about what they mean to authors, because the emotional dimension is at least as important as the financial one.

For most literary authors, especially those who are not bestsellers, writing is a lonely and largely unacknowledged activity. You spend years working on a book. You publish it. A few hundred or a few thousand people read it. Some of them write kind reviews. Most of them say nothing. You go back to your desk and start the next book, wondering if anyone noticed the first one.

A prize nomination, even a longlisting, breaks that isolation. It says: someone read your book carefully, compared it to the best work published this year, and decided it belonged in that company. For an author who has been working in relative obscurity, that recognition can be profoundly sustaining. I have had authors tell me that a longlisting gave them the confidence to finish their next book, that it validated years of work in a way that sales numbers alone could not.

This emotional value is real and it matters to me as a publisher. Part of my job is supporting authors through the long, unglamorous middle of their careers, and prizes are one of the few external sources of encouragement that the literary world provides. Even when the financial return is negligible, the human return can be significant.

In the meantime, small publishers like us will continue to play the game, submitting our best titles, hoping for recognition, and trying to extract maximum value from whatever attention comes our way. It is an imperfect system, but it is the one we have. And occasionally, against the odds, one of our books will find its way to a longlist or a shortlist, and the phone will ring a little more often, and we will sell a few more copies, and someone somewhere will discover a book they would not have found otherwise. That is worth $600 to me. Most years, it is worth even more.

Every title in our catalog, whether it is The Last Archive or Still Waters, represents a bet that good writing will eventually find its audience. Prizes are one mechanism for accelerating that discovery, and despite their peculiar economics, I remain convinced they are worth pursuing.