A little earlier today I listed some of the reactions to the 2019 Dragon Awards from the woke crowd. We have a late entry to the field.
This personage, s/he doesn’t rate high enough on the annoyance meter to get a nickname, has crossed my path before. Namely, posting something very incorrect on her blog regarding my work, acknowledging receipt of the correction and its accuracy and then failing to publicly correct the error. It’s a common trait among the “woke”, their “truth” has zero fucks to give about the facts.
Anyway, s/he weighed in and s/he did so with a whopper. Here is the premise:
The Dragon Awards, despite holding a 4-to-1 or more advantage in voter participation over the Hugos, is still not a legitimate award because of the Goodreads Awards, which has somewhere around 100,000 voters.
Yes, they do have more voters, dear, they also vote on every genre out there, not just Sci-Fi/Fantasy. And lets add in all the non-fiction categories too. So yeah, they have more voters because they have a much larger pool to draw from.
How many of those tens of thousands voted in Sci-Fi/Fantasy? I’m betting the answer is not 100%. I’ll be surprised if its even 10%. Most of those voters are there for Romance and other higher drawing genres.
And let us not even get into the reason why I call it TrollReads. I know of one person who has 30, yes, THIRTY, different Goodreads accounts. How many of those votes are one person casting multiple votes for their choices? How many different people are in the mix with multiple accounts? Sorry, dear, no sale.
So s/he will have to forgive me if I am not impressed by Goodreads numbers when it comes to SF/F. The truth is, the Dragons are the number one award in SF/F, both in prestige and in voter participation.
The other point s/he brings up is that Indie publishers didn’t win this year and the larger publishers did. I’m not sure why that matters. As long as the number of voters continues to increase, the better read we will get on what types of stories SF/F really do enjoy.
This year’s Dragons sent a statement to the woke crowd, accounting for the wailing “REEEEEEEEEEEEE” we keep hearing: The trash you tried to shove down our throats is rejected, go peddle it to your own kind the next time you gather down in mom’s basement for Pop Tarts and Kool-Aid.
Yes, it was a good day for Baen and some of the other larger publishers. Yes, I’d like to see an Indie author collect of those amazingly beautiful awards. It looks like they have a new design this year and it looks awesome. As soon as I can track down a good photo of it, I’ll post it.
I don’t doubt for a second that an Indie publisher will have his or her name called one day soon. The challenge for those of us who are Indie (or a hybrid like me who publishes his novels Indie but publishes short stories traditionally) is to make it happen.
And it will happen, trust me.
And when that day arrives they’ll be able to hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth all the way to that little planet that circles Tau Ceti, 12 light-years from Earth.
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