This holiday season, bookstore window displays and Christmas stockings will be filled with novels minted with gold and silver medals.

Those gilded stamps denote recognition by literary prizes like the National Book Award

which was just announced last month.

Alexander Manchell which was just announced last month.

Alexander Manchell is the author of writing backwards, historical fiction, and the reshaping of the American canon.

With Melanie Walsh, he recently wrote a piece for the online magazine

Public Books titled, What 35 Years of Data can tell us about who will win the National Book Award?

But before we get to the changes in how literary prizes have been awarded over the past few decades,

I asked Manchell whether these prizes actually matter, and he told me that whether we like it or not their influence is undeniable

even just finalists for these prizes are more likely to be read, taught, and the ones that win get an even bigger boost.

Here Manchelles cites a study he co-wrote with Laura B. McGrath and J.D. Porter, called

Who cares about literary prizes?

We looked at hundreds of high-profile 21st century novels, and we found that the number of

Goodreads ratings, which is a kind of proxy for readership

jumps from 48,000 for a book that is not even shortlisted to 98,000 for a book that

wins. The same is true on university syllabide.

The average book, even a high profile book, is taught a grand total of zero times

in a university classroom, but it ends up on as many as 15 syllabi on average when it wins.

And what about sales?

You know, sales is the great mystery and the brass ring for scholars like me. We don't have good

publicly available data on sales so we have to use these other proxies for

readership to figure that out and And of course, sales don't always

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