Some good news…

While I was traveling last weekend, I learned that my short story “The Martian Obelisk” won the Locus Award for best short story. I’m honored! Very honored.

The Locus awards are determined by readers voting for their favorite fiction of the year. So I want to thank all of you who felt “The Martian Obelisk” was worthy of your vote. I truly appreciate it!

The story is also a finalist for the Hugo award, so if you’re eligible to vote for that, I hope you’ll consider it.

If you haven’t read “The Martian Obelisk” yet, you can find it online at Tor.com.

And follow this link for a list of nominees and winners in all categories.

The finalists for the 2018 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award have been announced. The award is for the best short science fiction of the year — and my Tor.com story “The Martian Obelisk” has the honor of appearing on the list, among some stellar company.

The other finalists are:

“The Martian Obelisk” is available to read online here.

I’ve got some wonderful news to share: My short story “The Martian Obelisk” has been named as a finalist for the Hugo Award!

This is pretty exciting for me. After all, I’m a bit of a late bloomer. It’s been thirty-one years since my first fiction publication, and this is my first-ever appearance on the Hugo ballot. So it’s extra special!

If you haven’t read “The Martian Obelisk” yet, please check it out! You can find it online right here at Tor.com.

I want to say THANK YOU to everyone who’s read the story, to everyone who nominated it, and especially to editor Ellen Datlow, who liked the story enough to publish it at Tor.com.

Other short story finalists are:
• “Carnival Nine,” by Caroline M. Yoachim (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 2017)
• “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand,” by Fran Wilde (Uncanny, September 2017)
• “Fandom for Robots,” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Uncanny, September/October 2017)
• “Sun, Moon, Dust” by Ursula Vernon, (Uncanny, May/June 2017)
• “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™,” by Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex, August 2017)

Check out the full list of Hugo Award finalists here at Tor.com. You’re sure to discover some amazing reading.

The list of finalists for this year’s John W. Campbell Memorial Award was just released, and I’m very pleased to report that Going Dark was included.

Back in 2014, The Red: First Light also made the list.

The Campbell Memorial award honors the best English-language science fiction novel published in the prior year.

For the full list of finalists, and information about the award, visit the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.

Third post within 24 hours, because apparently I blog in flurries…

The deadline for Hugo Award nominations is March 31, just a few days away. For those eligible to nominate, I hope you’ll consider Going Dark in the best novel category when filling out your nomination ballot. The Trials is also eligible, if you’re truly enthusiastic. 😉

Another suggestion is a vote for my editor, Joe Monti, in the Editor/Long Form category — but not just because he had the courage and enthusiasm to publish me. In 2015, Joe launched Saga Press, a rapidly growing and much praised line of science fiction and fantasy, at a time when other SF imprints are disappearing. Click here to see some of the books published by Saga Press in their first year, 2015. Scroll through the pages and you’ll be able to see some upcoming titles.

Saga Press is an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

In a word: Publicity.

With thousands of books published every month (and all those earlier books still available, if not in print, then in ebook form) what are the odds of any particular book being noticed? Well, the odds are not good.

On occasion I will hear that “awards don’t matter” and for many titles this is true. They sell abundantly regardless of short lists. But I can say from personal experience that being short-listed for a significant award really does increase a book’s visibility, and I think it’s a safe bet that winning a significant award increases visibility exponentially. So, since I really don’t want to see my books quietly fade away, I’ve made it a point to try to get them considered for awards.

With the Hugos and the Nebulas there’s not a lot you can do beyond saying “Hey, voters, please consider my book.” With other awards, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, for example, the publisher has to send print copies of a qualified book to a jury of judges.

All three of the awards I just mentioned are open to all novels published in their area of interest in the award year, regardless of who the publisher is … in other words, they are technically open to self-published novels.

The Arthur C. Clarke Award
Much to my disappointment, another major award, the Arthur C. Clarke award, is not open to self-published novels. The Clarke Award is a juried award for best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom, but when I asked if I could send in the UK editions of The Trials and Going Dark, I was told those books did not qualify because they had been published under my own imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC. (The North American edition is published by Saga Press/Simon & Schuster.)

Yes, I was disappointed, but I am not criticizing. The award administrators have a very challenging job as it is, and it’s certainly up to them to set the rules. I was also told that they are continuing to review their policy regarding self-published submissions.

Unlike most awards that I’m aware of, the Clarke Award releases a list of those books that have been submitted for consideration. This list of novels was published today. It includes 113 titles — with just 33% by women.

I would have loved to increase that percent just a little! Ah well.

I do encourage you to read the commentary that follows the list of books. There is some interesting analysis and a brief discussion on the focus of the award, and on the question of “What is science fiction?”

The 2014 Nebula Awards Nominations were published today. If you haven’t seen the list yet, you can find it here. A lot of the shorter fiction — those works published at Tor.com, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld for example, are available to read online, so check those out if you get the chance.

Given the vast amount of fiction being published these days, the publicity that follows being nominated for an award like the Nebulas can be a real boost to a writer’s career, as I can personally attest after The Red: First Light was nominated last year in the novel category.

TRFL was initially self-published. (It’s being re-released by Saga Press/Simon & Schuster in June.) Back in December 2013 I posted on “Awards & Self-published Books” in response to Shaun Duke, who suggested there were logistical problems in considering self-published books for the major awards. If you’re interested in revisiting the discussion, my post includes links to Shaun’s, and there is a follow-up here.

A hearty congratulations to this year’s nominees!

So this is kind of cool…

As I mentioned last month, The Red: First Light was included as one of fifteen nominees for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, a juried award presented for the best science-fiction novel of the year. It didn’t win the award — that enviable honor went to Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux — but as it turns out, it placed third, behind Paul McAuley’s Evening’s Empires. I’m happy with that.

The link above will fall out of date as time passes, so here’s a link to a PDF announcement detailing both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award results, and the associated Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction.

More good news for The Red: First Light! The novel has been honored as a finalist for The John W. Campbell Memorial Award. This must have been a good year for science fiction, because there are fifteen finalists — more than in any other recent year.

The Campbell Memorial Award is a juried award presented for the best science-fiction novel of the year. It’s considered one of the three major annual awards for science fiction, and is generally limited to science fiction — in other words, it does not consider fantasy novels. The award is administered by Christopher McKitterick, Director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas.

The winner has not been announced yet, though no doubt it will be soon. Again, I have no expectation of winning, but as with the Nebulas, it truly is an honor just to be nominated.

This is actually my second Campbell nomination. My novel Memory was nominated back in 2004 — something I never knew at the time. It was only in the last year or so that I discovered it on the list of nominees — a rather ironic surprise.

The full list of finalists can be found here.

And more information on the award itself can be found here.

Today, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) announced the nominees for the 2013 Nebula Awards, to be presented in 2014. I don’t mind saying that I was a bit stunned but very pleased to learn that the The Red: First Light was on the novel shortlist.

Thank you to everyone who took time out to read the novel and recommend it to others, and who helped to get the word out! This was the first science fiction novel I wrote in over ten years. Given that span of time, it was really gratifying to know that readers were still interested in my work.

I haven’t done the research, but the consensus on twitter is that this is the first self-published novel to make the Nebula shortlist, which is kind of interesting. If you’d like to know why I chose to self-publish, here’s a post from last fall.

For SFWA members who’d like to read TRFL, ebook copies are available in the forum.

Congratulations to all the other 2013 Nebula nominees. To see the complete list, visit Locus Online.