Hugo Nominations Announced

[kevin_standlee]

I'd been advised that the Hugo Award nominations would be posted at 5 PM PDT, and the first place I saw them was when the Anticipation web site updated a couple of minutes past 5. I then spent the next 45 minutes or so doing the cut-past-reformat onto The Hugo Awards web site announcement. For the SF AwardsWatch announcement we just reference the Anticipation (and Hugo Award site) announcements, but it has been our policy that the official Hugo Awards site should have the full list. We did not include the "extras" on the Anticipation site, such as the links to the nominees and to free downloads of selected works, principally because those are almost certainly going to change as additional nominees add their works to the free download list.

Thanks to my rushing, I did manage to mangle the link from the Hugo Awards site to Anticipation's, but a couple of quick commenters set me straight and I fixed it quickly. I think we're okay now, and can start paying attention to the early reactions.

Congratulations to all of the nominees, although particular congratulations to Cheryl, of course.

I'm also pleased to see that Girl Genius made the ballot as I hoped it would. Pity there weren't more nominations in the category, though. I would have expected more people to have nominated there.

And speaking of number of nominations, I'm happy to see the total number of nominating ballots having increased over last year. Denvention Three had 483 valid nominating ballots. Anticipation received 799. Pity there wasn't one more to make it a nice round 800, although people being the way they are, I bet that if that had been the count, there would have been people assuming is was an approximation.

Comments

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

I think people were confused by the notion of a whole story in the Graphic Story category. Take a series like Claymore. Some stories take two or three volumes of the Manga to tell. Trinity (not Science Fiction) has 52 issues and probably four trades to it. That is an easier to nominate for the whole story.

I am glad that 300 plus more people voted this year than last year. Could it be that attendance as of 1/31 this year was up from last year? Anticipation is at 2,600 people before the website issues a week ago or so.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I don't think that it's total membership that's up; however, I think there may have been renewed interest in voting among the existing members. It's still not a great percentage, estimating that there were probably around 5000 people eligible to nominate, but it's an improvement.