Today I’m talking about book recommendations. As a moderator and long time member of the r/fantasy community on reddit, this is something that comes up often on there and I’ve seen it spill over into other book discussion areas like ‘book’ twitter.
Why are book recommendations such a hot button topic? Well, over on r/fantasy especially (but I’ve seen book list recommendations elsewhere) there’s a tendency for people to recommend the same few authors over and over and over again. And honestly, in a field as broad as SFF with so many wonderful authors both in the history of the genre and producing fantastic new works today (I really feel as if we’re living in a golden age of SFF with all the great content coming out every year) it’s a bit shocking that the same authors get mentioned time and time again. Or is it? Let’s examine.
Why Recommendations Are Important
First I think we need to mention why book recommendations are so important in the book community. How do readers find books?
- Browsing bookshelves in book stores — these are usually stocked with the most popular and best selling titles/authors (I’ve seen Tolkien and Song of Ice and Fire take up entire book cases with various editions and multiple copies) or new releases only.
- Recommendation lists on websites / forums — popular authors will, inevitably, get recommended more, or sometimes just authors that are popular in a specific community (there’s sometimes a bit of an echo chamber effect).
- People talking about books on social media
- Book club selections
- ‘Also read’ recommendations from websites you purchase books at and places like Goodreads as well as general searching on these sites (whether by filtering by category, genre, or some other general search)
- Directly asking for recommendations
- There’s probably something I left out, let’s just pretend I said it here. 😉
I’m not going to go into minute details here because there are far smarter people than I that have talked about this at length–I’ve linked some of their discussions at the end of this post. But, in short, recommendations are important because they’re a part of book advertising. Books rarely get tv spots. Some books might have enough of a marketing budget to send their authors on book tours. Some might have enough to do blog tours only or send ARCs out to reviewers, both professional and non-paid. Ultimately, word of mouth remains a huge part of what sells books. I’ve had friends that have written reviews for books that directly resulted in a sales bump for an author–maybe small but noticeable!
The thing is, it’s been shown that the publishing game is not a fair field of play. Some authors get left behind because publishing companies think ‘this isn’t want the market wants’ so despite buying the book and publishing it, it’s not given a fair shot right out of the gate. I’m happy to say I’ve seen some of this changing in recent years! But you can see why word of mouth is so important for some books, especially those with smaller (or maybe none with some self-published authors) marketing budgets. Authors today are expected to do their own self-promo, but a lot of people don’t trust self promo whereas community recommendations can be more trusted.
Changing the Game
While it might be frustrating to those of us readers that might have a read a much wider selection of genre books to see these same names and book titles come up on lists over and over and over again, we can kind of see why it happens and there’s nothing inherently wrong with popular books remaining popular. However, this inevitbly means that there are a whole lot of books that are amazing and aren’t getting mentioned as much. So, what can we do to change this? Well, there’s a popular saying ‘be the change you want to see’.
- Make your own lists. On r/fantasy we’ve had members run several ‘big lists’ created over the years to veer away from ‘the most popular of all time’ or ‘top favorites’ titles (these usually doesn’t see too much change from year to year). Some of these lists have been ‘Hopeful and Uplifting Novels’, ‘Top Female Authored Books/Series’, ‘Top Self-Published’, ‘Top LGBTQA+ Books’, etc. Or you could just make your own favorites list and fill it with your own personal favorites! Whether you run a blog or just like to talk about your favorites over twitter or some other social media, there’s room for your voice in the conversation about books. (And don’t tell me that twitter doesn’t sell books because I can’t tell you how many books I’ve bought because people were talking about them on twitter (probably somewhere between 50 and 100 if I’m guessing).
- Read more widely and diversely. Now, I do consider the irony of this since I read MOSTLY speculative fiction, however, even within speculative fiction there is a HUGE range of books from stories that are literary, historical, mystery, romance, etc. There’s series and there’s standalone novels and all different lengths of fiction. Besides the length and sub-genre, there are a ton of books written by diverse authors and I’m so excited that fantasy has seemed to finally broken away from the standard faux European medieval setting (in some respects, at least). I’m not advocating to read things that you don’t like, but what I’m saying is to once in a while challenge yourself and think about the books you’re picking to read and why you’re picking them. Maybe try something outside your comfort zone just to see if you like it–who knows this could be a new favorite! If you read more widely and more diversely then you’ll be able to have more types of books to recommend to others instead of just what’s popular.
- Recommend books that actually fit what a person is asking for. Oftentimes on r/fantasy we joke around that Malazan gets recommended for anything anytime someone is asking for a recommendation. This isn’t true even thought it feels like it sometimes–I’ve definitely seen it recommended for things it shouldn’t be recced for, like someone looking for a romance, heh. But if someone is looking for recommendations for something specific, try to tamp down your immediate gut instinct to recommend whatever your favorite book/series is and ask yourself, does this actually fit what this person is looking for?
So, I guess what I’m saying is that I feel like it’s important to think about what books we’re recommending and why and sometimes what books we’re reading and why. We all love reading books and I want there to be more of the type of books that I love reading so I buy those books and when I love them I champion them on my online spaces. And as a member of this community I feel like that’s the least I can do. Do you feel like book recommendations are important? Do you ever reflect on the recommendations you’re putting out there? Leave a note in the comments, I’d love to chat!
Resources / Further Reading
Here’s a list of resources or articles related to the topic of book recommendations or other things discussed above.
- r/Fantasy’s Big Lists
- Ten Criminally Underrated Fantasy Books by Adrian Collins at Grimdark Magazine
- Tor.com’s book recommendations tag
- What Books r/fantasy Recommends (statistical analysis of 2000+ comments in June) by u/LOLtohru
- A Guide for Authors on Recommending Books by Jeffe Kennedy
- What We Recommended, 2019 Edition by Krista D. Ball via r/fantasy
- Recommendations: Predictions, Perceptions, and Realities by Krista D. Ball via r/fantasy
Other Topics Related to Recommendations (Why they Matter):
- Why aren’t there more women in the SFF section? by Mary Robinette Kowal
- I Only Read Good Books by Travis at The Fantasy Inn
- Finding Our Way Into Fantasy Fiction by HiuGregg at The Fantasy Inn
- But Whatabout: A Comprehensive List of Links, Comments, and Replies by Krista D Ball via r/fantasy This is a FANTASTIC roundup discussion post with lots of links to further discussions on specific related topics from author’s blog posts, to articles, to twitter threads, to r/fantasy posts, etc.