Awards and all that!

When you consider books that place in ANY awards please do your homework and figure out how they even got noticed in the first place. Since more than half the battle of new authors and publishers is being heard over the noise the large publishers can make with all their money and all their supposed "clout," for most awards what's written below is the BEST most can do to find the talent that's out there. Read on:

Hugo Awards

Submitting Your Work

How do I submit my book (or story or movie) for nomination for a Hugo Award?

The short answer is, “you can’t”. If the Hugos were judged by a small panel, as is the case with some other awards, then you could send your work to the award jury. But the Hugo Awards nomination process is open to every member of the current and previous Worldcon. That means that the “jury” often consists of more than 5,000 people. You don’t want to send your work to all of them, even assuming you could.

There is no submission process for the Hugo Award. You do not have to register your work with anyone to be eligible. There is no submission or entry fee. The Hugo voters are good at finding and nominating good works, and do talk among themselves, so word spreads. There are also third-party web sites where people can make recommendations for Hugo Awards. Some of these sites are listed on the sidebar at the right. (Listing here does not imply official endorsement. If you know of a site that accumulates recommendations, let us know so we can add it to the list.)

They say: "The Hugo voters are good at finding and nominating good works, and do talk among themselves, so word spreads." I'm not suggesting I know another way but there certainly needs to be another way. This is truly disturbing . . . to me anyway. You may be just fine with it. What if we were determining who the best doctor of the year is? There would be criteria. There would be qualified candidates . . . or we could just base it on whatever doctor we "heard" the most about. Good grief! Sorry. Authors are no different. There's a way to determine the best and this is not it. Just my opinion. Nevertheless, to the Hugo Award winners I will say congrats. If for no other reason than just for getting "noticed."