Guest Post: Five Things You Should Know About Award Nominations

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by Nancy Fulda


It’s awards season. It comes around every year, and every year authors wonder whether they should put their work out for consideration.

This can be a scary thing. Making a bid for an award can feel a bit like facing a hoard of angry dogs with only a single hardback volume to defend you from their slathering teeth. Oh, and it’s a book you’ve written, and it’s your only copy.

By the time they’ve got a story or two on the market, most authors already know the basic principles of self-promotion. I’m not going to talk about sharing copies of the story with awards readers, except to say that it’s completely ethical and standard practice within speculative fiction. I’m not going to talk about blogging or tweeting about your own work, except to say keep it short and keep it interesting. And I’m not going to talk about the icky feeling that sometimes comes from campaigning for award nominations, except to say that it is largely illusory.

Instead, after watching this industry chug for 10+ years and sitting on both sides of the nomination table, I’m going to talk about a couple of things that every up-and-coming author ought to know.

(1) No amount of dogs and ponies will convince people to vote against their conscience.*

Said another way: Self-promotion can get people to read your story, but it can’t make them like it.

I didn’t always believe this. Long ago, when my earliest stories were in print, I took great pains to prevent any kind of favoritism. Once, I submitted under a pseudonym because I feared the magazine’s staff might be unfairly partial to my submission. (They bought the story anyway and we all laughed about it afterward).

What I learned (primarily during several subsequent years on the editorial staff for a top-paying magazine) is that no amount of positive predisposition will make me like a mediocre story. I used get subs from people I adored in real life, people I so badly wanted to see succeed, or perhaps people who’d written stories that I slathered over in the past. I’d read the first line with eager anticipation, and I could almost see the little red enthusiasm bar in my head sliding downward, with accompanying sound effects. No amount of wishful thinking was ever able to change that.

I’ve observed editors and fans closely over the years. By and large, across all of speculative fiction, readers do not like stories any better just because they have positive feelings toward the author. Remember how angry you were the last time one of your favorite authors wrote a dud? Yeah. It’s like that.

This is not to say that nominations cannot be gamed. There are plenty of unconscionable people in this world, and unconscionable people do all kinds of things. There is also the question of whether it’s fair to leverage a large audience from a different venue to get yourself on an awards ballot. Fair questions, all. But know this: if you put your story in front of a sincere, conscionable subset of the industry, and that story is subsequently nominated for an award, you may rest assured that the nomination happened because the story was truly awesome and not because you exerted some kind of undue manipulation.

Correspondingly, there is no point in making a big fuss over a story that does not have the chops to go the distance. See point 2.

(2) You are allowed to have a favorite child.

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