Awards & My Philosophy Re Making Nominations & Voting
Sir Julius Vogel Award
Last week I reminded y’all that it was Sir Julius Vogel nomination time—among many other awards, I believe—and encouraged those who’d enjoyed a work of New Zealand SFFH this year to get nominating.
On Thursday, I was also upfront about the fact that I have nominated Rebecca Fisher for her fan writing, not least the Big Worlds On Small Screens column for this blog.
In passing, another SFFH afficionado mentioned that: “I suppose you make lots of nominations.”
In some years, I certainly have, but I do have a philosophy around nominations that means the number I make will vary from year to year.
First and foremost, I won’t nominate any work I haven’t read in full, so the number of nominations I make depends on how much reading I’ve managed to get done during the period of eligibility (usually the past year.)
But although I do prefer to have read a work in order to nominate it, once I’ve done that my subsequent approach is fairly straightforward: if I’ve enjoyed the work and believe it fits the criteria of the awards, then I’ll happy nominate away. The reason for this is that I like to see a good range of nominations and support both the genre and other content creators.
The only difficulty comes if there is a limit set on the number of works any one individual can nominate (this is not the case with the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, though) and I’ve enjoyed a large number of qualifying works. Then, alas, I have to choose, even at nomination stage.
Otherwise, the only time I must decide which is my favourite, is when the time comes to cast my final vote. Sometimes that can be very tough, but once again, I’ll only vote if I’ve read/viewed all the shortlist. Usually that’s not difficult, but last year I don’t recall voting for any shortlist, despite being eligible to vote on several, because I was so locked into completing Daughter of Blood that I didna have time to do the reading.
A friend asked me if I couldn’t just vote on “track record”, if I know I usually really “heart” a particular writer or artist’s work—but I feel that if the category is for a book, short story, or film etc, one can only vote on the basis of the particular, nominated work.
Anyway, that’s me—and why, alas, I won’t be doing much nominating this year. I do hope, though, to have the bandwidth to read enough shortlisted works to get all vote-y in the final rounds—at least in some, if not all, categories of interest, such as novels and short fiction.
I agree with you. This year there were only a couple of works I could nominate for the Sir Julius Vogel, for I simply haven’t done the reading. I nominated those I could though, for they are amazingly good books and need the attention. If we don’t nominate, then only the works publicised by those who publicise will be seen – these awards are how we show other fans what fans think are especially good.
I would love to see a list of eligible short fiction as well as the SFFANZ list of novels. Short fiction publication is so diverse it would really help with tracking down and reading eligible works…(especially in last minute “binges” of reading 😉 )
The Ditmars are easy that way, because a very tiny group of entirely awesome people put together a list. Makes it much easier to jog one’s memory. I wish we had lists like this for all the fan awards.
But short fiction publication opportunities are so diverse these days, and international, it must still be difficult for even a small dedicated group to keep track of all the eligible short fiction published in a calendar year?