Dragon Awards Category Changes

Today the Dragon Awards officially declared nominations are being taken for the 2018 awards. The site had already been updated and opened to participants some days ago.

They also announced the creation of a new category, and the retirement of another.

We are excited to announce, Best Media Tie-In Novel, as a new category for the 2018 Dragon Awards!

Qualifications for this new category include: that it is a novel, 70,000 words in length, containing a single story, (no anthologies) based on a media property: comic book, game, graphic novel, literary work, movie or television series.

The category of Best Apocalyptic Novel has been retired. In the award’s first two years it was won by Nick Cole for Ctrl Alt Revolt! (2016) and Cory Doctorow for Walkaway (2017).

[Thanks to Laura for the story.]

14 thoughts on “Dragon Awards Category Changes

  1. I know nothing about the Dragon Awards beyond what I’ve read here over the past year or two, but whoever wrote this announcement is (in my opinion) a terrible writer who has no business judging other writers or administering such a process. Is 70K words the maximum, minimum, or exact word count required for eligibility? Three superfluous commas and the clunky “include: that it is” aren’t so great either, nor is the idea of a novel that “contains” a single story (I think “constitutes” might be the intent).

  2. I wonder if the possibility of a certain sequel getting nominated and withdrawn prompted the retirement. But maybe it was simply the one with the lowest participation.

  3. FYI, from the Dragon Awards Official Rules:

    DRAGON CON is not responsible for any problems or technical, hardware, or software malfunctions of any telephone network or telephone lines,

    PRIVACY POLICY: Personal information collected by DRAGON CON during the administration of this Award may be used by DRAGON CON to contact Entrants regarding DRAGON CON’s products or services, for its marketing purposes, in conjunction with executing the terms of this Sweepstakes.

    Telephone network/lines? Sweepstakes? Say what?

  4. Yep, it’s been discussed in detail here in the past that the Dragon Awards terms and conditions are just the same boilerplate verbiage which can be found on website sweepstakes all over the internet.

    My personal take on that is that the awards were set up by someone who views them as a contest for readers and authors to “win”, rather than as a recognition program for outstanding works (and certainly there are plenty of other aspects of the awards which support that belief).

  5. @Daniel, I think someone speculated last year that they had ripped off the legalese from some contest, and had failed to file off the serial numbers sufficiently. Seems probable.

  6. There were commenters like myself who hoped that they would learn from the shambles of the first year. But at this rate, it might take decades for the Dragons to be administered properly, let alone gain respectability & prestige.

  7. I do like the idea of a media tie-in category (and would have plenty to nominate from my Star Wars reading), but at this stage that’s like getting excited at a new menu item from a restaurant full of cockroaches. Call pest control first, my friends!

  8. Also, the announcement title suggests this is actually a “new cateTory”, not a “new cateGory” as we might have expected…!

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  10. A media tie-in category was one of the better suggestions from last year for aligning the awards with the actual Con culture, so it’s nice to see them listening. (To that, at least)

  11. Well, I am rather disappointed that the Dragon Awards administrators did not implement any of the useful suggestions I offered in a column here last summer.

    All I have to say at this point is Good Luck!

  12. This makes sense.

    Dropping Apocalyptic also makes sense, as it is a subgenre of something else, leading to conflicts over which category to nominate things for, not just in the occasional edge case but all the time. (Though a similar argument would support dropping the Military category.)

    That they have changed the rules after the start of nominations is, I fear, typical of the Dragons.

    JJ:
    My personal take on that is that the awards were set up by someone who views them as a contest for readers and authors to “win”, rather than as a recognition program for outstanding works (and certainly there are plenty of other aspects of the awards which support that belief).

    I think they are fairly open about this, and from what I have seen they take it to be implicit in the meaning of the word ‘fan’; they see it as obvious that a fan is a fan of a particular author. So obviously in entering an awards process like this, you will want to vote for the author you are a fan of.

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