Testing the Best Editor Spilt

[kevin_standlee]

Now that the Hugo Award nominations are closed, cherylmorgan (with some help from me) is running over at Emerald City a test of the Best Editor Split Hugo Award. If you haven't been following these things, you may not have heard that last year, a proposal to split Best Editor into two categories (Short Fiction/Long Fiction) passed the Business Meeting. If ratified this year, it will become part of the WSFS Constitution and the 2007 Worldcon would start awarding two Editor Hugo Awards.

As Cheryl explains in her blog, right now is a good opportunity to run a test of the proposed split categories. She has put up the two new categories and is soliciting recommendations for them as if they were on this year's ballot. The results may be useful for the ratification debate at L.A.con IV this August. I'm not taking a position on the proposal, as I chair the Business Meeting, but running a test like this seems like a good idea to me, especially as we can't use the Special Committee Category as a live test.

Comments

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Editor is such a mysterious category. It's really important, but it's mysterious.

Short fic editor is very useful and helpful; anthology and magazine editors are definitely more visible to the average fan than long fic editors at publishing houses. The only reason I can name some long fic editors is because I know them socially.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Trying to avoid advocacy: Patrick Nielsen Hayden said that publishers are starting to credit book editors more often, and he suggests that a split of the category might help accellerate this process.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think it makes a lot of sense, and the split will drive the recognition of long-work editors (particularly when there is a year or two of under-nominations and/or low-count nominations).