The DisCon III committee told Facebook followers today that 1,246 people submitted nominations for the 2021 Hugo Awards.
They plan to announce the finalists on Tuesday, April 13.
The number of nominators this year is the smallest since 2012, when 1,101 ballots were received. Last year, CoNZealand received 1,584 nominating ballots.
For a complete table of known voting statistics, see Jo Van Ekeren’s “Hugo Voting: Let’s Look at the Record Yet Again”.
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The low nomination level is worrying a decline in nominations is how the Puppies abused the system
I wonder what the Worldcons of the future can do better to improve interest (although some of this may be that some wondered about a digital con and didn’t sign up prior to the new end of year deadline
Disappointing but not surprising. I assume I wasn’t the only one who did a lot of comfort rereads in 2020 rather than new stuff.
The facebook link is to a private group. Here’s the public facebook post.
bookworm1398 says Disappointing but not surprising. I assume I wasn’t the only one who did a lot of comfort rereads in 2020 rather than new stuff.
I too am doing mostly comfort reads during The Pandemic with the latest being Emma Bull’s Finder: A Novel of The Borderlands which I’ve a signed first edition of. Before that I read Jane Yolen’s The Wild Hunt.
Matt Cavanagh: The low nomination level is worrying a decline in nominations is how the Puppies abused the system
I don’t think it’s that worrying. A lot of people couldn’t get as many (or any) books from their libraries last year, which would have made it harder to read new works. And a lot of people were put in a dire financial situation (or spent less money due to worries about their future financial situation), so I expect that Worldcon members were buying fewer new books. And as bookworm1398 said, a lot of people were turning to comfort reads.
And a decline in nominations isn’t how the Puppies abused the system. Nominator totals were rising significantly every year prior to the Puppies. They were able to abuse the system because of a known weakness in the rules which has now been greatly ameliorated.
I found it very difficult to read new works. I kept putting them down, or not picking them up in the first place. Some I did read, and nominated what I felt was excellent. Most of my 2020 was re-reading comfort reads, such as The Goblin Emperor and Paladin of Souls.
I did spend February and March of 2021 going through various recommendation lists, especially for short stories and novelettes.
Pingback: An Open Letter to the 2021 Hugo Finalists, Whoever They May Be | Cora Buhlert
@cat
I too am doing mostly comfort reads during The Pandemic with the latest being Emma Bull’s Finder: A Novel of The Borderlands which I’ve a signed first edition of. Before that I read Jane Yolen’s The Wild Hunt.
I’ve also got a signed first edition of Finder. Got it signed at Boskone 31.
While I did read quite a few “new to me” works last year, I didn’t read nearly as many “new for the year” works (I did read a few, and some of them ended up in “Best Novel” and/or “Best Series” (one or two caused nominations in both).
I also failed to complete my micro-blogging about what I was reading, making it harder to go back towards the end of the year and find out which if the things I read were eligible.
But, still, I nominated, in multiple categories.
The only categories that were affected in my nominations were the dramatic presentation ones. The delays to both filming and cinema releases have considerably reduced the pool from which to choose nominees this year.
I have never seen any figures for the proportion of ballots that only nominate in those categories, but i would suggest that some of those who do may not have nominated at all this year.