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SFWA Releases Nebula Suggested Reading List

Click here to get to the Suggested reading List; lots of good stuff on there.
Click here to get to the Suggested reading List; lots of good stuff on there.
This has been in discussion for a while now; I’m glad we’ve finally moved ahead on the project of making the Nebula Suggested Reading List public. The intent is to build awareness of the awards, help drive participation by members, and help the genre by providing a solid list of notable material from the year. Authors do not need to be SFWA members to make their work eligible.

Here’s the official press release about it:

As part of its mission to serve professional genre writers, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is pleased to announce that for the first time they’ll be making the Nebula Suggested Reading List public. The list is compiled from the suggestions of SFWA members and is available on the SFWA website at http://www.sfwa.org/forum/index.php?app=readinglist. All SFWA members are eligible to add items to the list throughout the year, providing a list of notable speculative novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, and dramatic works from the year. Inclusion on the list is not an endorsement by SFWA.

From November 15 through February 15, 2016, Active and Associate members will be able to make actual Nebula nominations as well as nominations for the Bradbury and Andre Norton Award. The votes will be tallied and the final ballot will be released on or before February 20 for voting on by the membership. Winners will be announced at the Nebula Awards Weekend, to be held May 12 -15 at the Palmer House in Chicago. The banquet and awards ceremony will take place the evening of May 14. Other awards presented at the weekend include the Grand Master Award, the Kevin O’Donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award, and the Solstice Award.

Nebula Commissioner Terra LeMay says “Even before I became the Nebula Awards Commissioner, I’ve always thought the Suggested Reading List was one of the best resources I’ve ever encountered for finding the most exciting new science fiction and fantasy works each year. It is a great privilege to have helped bring this list out to the public where any reader may benefit from it.”

SFWA President Cat Rambo notes, “Every year there’s plenty of terrific stuff to read. I hope that providing a list that draws upon the wide spectrum of tastes represented in the SFWA’s membership of professional writers helps up the discoverability of great writing that should be considered for awards. For me the Nebula Awards remain the most meaningful in the field, chosen by writers working in the genre, who understand and appreciate craft and who possess an understanding of the works that have shaped our field. SFWA has had a productive year in 2015, and it’s a pleasure to share yet another result of our members working together.”

For more information please email pr@sfwa.org.

Recent high notes for SFWA include the Accessibility Checklist being made available to the public, an event Lee Martindale blogged eloquently about. Several conventions have expressed interest in the checklist already and we’ve gotten some useful feedback on how to update them to make them even more useful.

Stick with us; there’s even more cool stuff coming in 2016.

49 Responses

  1. Although some folks are worried about any ranked list turning into a slate, I think those fears are overblown. I’m doing my own non-profit recommendation site, http://www.rocketstackrank.com, and I got a little of that at the start, but people got used to it. It helps that we’ve got more than one ranking, I suppose.

    A trick I used at Microsoft and Amazon to get a bit more control over lists is to use the law of large numbers. Take the square root of the total number of votes. Anything with fewer votes than that goes into two buckets: “one vote” and “more than one vote.” Then rank the rest using their actual vote totals. This handles the fact that there isn’t much real difference between things with small numbers of votes–random chance dominates.

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SFWA Effort to Support Crowdfunding

IMG_0557We just launched a very cool new effort. Here’s the release:

Crowdfunded self-publishing has emerged as a viable and increasingly popular path to creative and financial success for writers, and we continue to develop new initiatives to assist our members in their crowdfunding efforts. Now we are looking to expand our outreach beyond our own membership, to support the field at large.

Beginning in January, SFWA will be making small, targeted pledges to worthy Kickstarter projects projects by non-members, designating them a “SFWA Star Project.” Projects will be selected by the Self Publishing Committee, coordinated by volunteer Rob Balder. Selections will be based on the project’s resonance with SFWA’s exempt purposes, and special preference will be given to book-publishing projects in the appropriate genres.

Funds for these pledges will come from the SFWA Givers Fund, from a $1000 pool approved by the Grants Committee in December. When a pledge results in receiving a donor reward such as a signed book, these items will be auctioned off at fundraising events, to help replenish the Givers Fund.

The first two Star Projects are: Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu by Jonathan Green, and Blacktastic: A Podcast of Black Scifi and Fantasy Stories.

As the landscape continues to change, we face the organizational challenge of finding new ways to inform, support, promote and defend writers of fantasy and science fiction. We hope that this kind of outreach and recognition will not only benefit writers, but also help raise awareness of SFWA’s core mission among independent professionals and their readers.

Over the past few years, I’ve been helping with the effort to open SFWA doors to professional writers publishing outside the traditional structure, to the point where we are the only writers organization (I believe) to accept crowdfunded publications as membership qualifying material. The Star Project effort ties in nicely with that and it’s gratifying to see SFWA continue to expand to match the changing needs of professional F&SF writers.

Rob Balder, who initially proposed the project, has been very patient with the way the wheels at SFWA grind exceedingly and tiresomely slowly at times. Speaking of which, I just got the mail this morning confirming our NetGalley account — we’ll be making that available to members who want to use the NetGalley system to put up books for review. That’s also been in the works a while and part of the slowdown has been my own chaotic inbox and a couple of pieces of mail getting lost in there.

Towards the end of next month, you’ll see yet another very cool project unveiled and available to SFWA members. (I am terrible with secrets and throttling back the urge to spill the beans, but I want it to have maximum impact. But so cool, and so far above the original vision that I have HUZZAH written multiple times in my notes for the demo. Are you intrigued? 😉 You should be.)

At the beginning of next month, I’ll be at Kevin J. Anderson’s Superstars seminars as a guest — looking forward to meeting everyone there.

Oh! And one more change while I’m thinking about it. Cynthia Ward is moving her excellent Market Report from the SFWA Bulletin to the SFWA blog, which I think will solve a couple of issues and also make it available on the website.

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More on The First Chapters Project

If you don’t know what the SFWA First Chapters project is, it’s an effort to collect first chapters from F&SF novels published throughout the year in a single compendium. This should help with reading for awards in that you have a chance to sample books before figuring out what you want to read in its entirety. For writers, it should be a chance to get that first chapter in front of reader eyes in order to convince them they want to keep going. In 2018 the focus is getting indie writers up and running with the program, but if you’re a small publisher interested in participating, let me know.

As part of that project, I asked the group working on it to make sure that people uploading first chapters can keyword their work so, for example, if you just wanted to see chapters eligible for a specific award, like the Sideways, Prometheus, or Andre Norton Awards.

Here’s the list I just gave them. Any other awards you’d add? I didn’t include ones that are restricted by geographical area like the Aurora or Endeavour Awards.

List of all keywords:
Alternative history novel
Anthropomorphic novel
Fantasy novel
First novel
Game-related novel
Horror novel
Libertarian
Media tie-in novel
MG novel
Military SF novel
PKD eligible
SF novel
Urban fantasy novel
YA novel

Bram Stoker Award
http://www.horror.org/awards/stokers.htm#about

Keywords: First novel, horror novel, YA novel

————————————————————

British Fantasy Awards
http://www.britishfantasysociety.org/british-fantasy-awards/

Keywords: fantasy novel, horror novel

————————————————————

British Science Fiction Awards
https://www.bsfa.co.uk/

Keywords: SF novel

————————————————————

Compton Crook Award
http://www.bsfs.org/CCA/bsfsccnu2014.htm

Keywords: First novel

————————————————————

David Gemmell Awards for Fantasy
http://www.gemmellawards.com/award-voting-2017/

Keywords: fantasy novel, first novel

————————————————————
Dragon Awards
http://awards.dragoncon.org/

Keywords: SF novel, fantasy novel, YA novel, MG novel, military SF novel, alternative history novel, media tie-in novel, horror novel
————————————————————

Ennie Awards
http://www.ennie-awards.com/blog/

Keywords: game-related novel

————————————————————

Hugo Awards
http://www.thehugoawards.org/
Keywords: SF novel, fantasy novel

————————————————————

Keystroke Medium Awards
http://www.keystrokemedium.com/ksm-awards.html

Keywords: SF novel, military SF novel, post-apocalyptic novel, fantasy novel, epic fantasy novel, urban fantasy novel, horror novel
————————————————————

Locus Awards
https://locusmag.com/

Keywords: SF novel, fantasy novel, first novel, YA novel

————————————————————

Nebula Awards/Norton
http://nebulas.sfwa.org

Keywords: Fantasy novel, SF novel, YA novel, MG novel

————————————————————

Philip K. Dick Award
http://www.philipkdickaward.org/

Keywords: PKD eligible (appeared in paperback rather than HB first)

————————————————————

Prometheus Award
http://www.lfs.org/

Keywords: libertarian novel

————————————————————

Sideways Awards
http://www.uchronia.net/sidewise/
Keywords: alternative history novel
————————————————————

Ursa Major Awards
http://www.ursamajorawards.org/

Keywords: anthropomorphic novel

————————————————————

World Fantasy Awards
http://www.worldfantasy.org/awards/

Keywords: fantasy novel

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