Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Trawling for Dragon Links

There are 20+ days left before the Dragon Awards close for nominations. To recap on the story so far: the Dragon Awards were set up last year in association with the massive commercial pop-culture convention Dragon Con. With multiple sub-genre categories and open voting, they were hailed by many on the hard right of science fiction as an alternative to the Hugo Awards. The final winners had many puppy-aligned books.

Zipping forward to the present. The falling out between various individuals aligned with the Puppy movements over the lack of a “Sad Puppies 5” has led to a specific focus on the failure to produce a list for the Dragon Awards. The question has arisen whether it is even worth bothering to campaign for the Dragon Awards because they will be so big that only the most popular of authors stand a chance.

However, this is an argument singularly lacking in data. No totals were ever released about how many people voted in the Dragon Awards and there is no way of knowing how many people will vote this time. The award is promoted at the Dragon Con site but whether that will translate into many of the attendees participating in the nominations is another question.

Of course, it is the nomination process that will shape the final vote. Fans may be keen to vote in competition pitting their favourite authors against each other but if the nominations are books most fans haven’t heard of…well, that will generate less enthusiasm.

So with little else to go on, I did some directed Google searches. By ‘directed’ I mean picking search terms and time frames and selecting links that fit criteria. The searches included a general search on “Dragon Award”, a search on “nominate me for a Dragon Award” and a search on “vote Dragon Award”. In each case the date range was kept from 1 January 2017 (to avoid last years Dragons) to June 30 (or July 1 or 2 depending on the day I searched). Only links promoting the Awards directly were picked – more general discussion was avoided*, other awards called ‘Dragon’ were avoided (of which there are many)**, and 2016 posts that appeared erroneously were avoided. Posts that appeared in multiple search terms are only included once for the first appearance. Posts from Dragon Con or the Dragon Award sites were not included.

The full list is after the fold. I haven’t tabulated the books recommended or done any other aggregation of the data yet – this is more so that I can do that at a later point. However, the list is mainly centred around Vox Day, Declan Finn and Jon Del Arroz’s various campaigns or related people. What I can’t capture is general, organic nominations from people who just know about the award. However, I hope this list can help us compare the impact of campiagning for the Dragon versus the more organic vote by comparing who gets nominated later in the year.

I may have missed posts obviously, but I got the impression from some 2016 hits that crept in of several places that seemed to have stuff about the 2016 awards but not the 2017 awards. That may imply a decline in interest – or it may not.

The list is given in the relevance order provided by Google per search. I decided to classify posts as:

  • General: posts asking people to vote or promoting the award but not listing any works.
  • Eligibility: posts by authors or publishers stating what was eligible but not speicifcally recommending how to vote.
  • Recommendations: lists or single book recommendations for voting.

Search 1:

http://www.locusmag.com/News/2017/04/2017-dragon-awards-voting-open/
April 28, 2017 General

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/06/dragon-awards-2017.html
June 06, 2017 Recommendations

http://monsterhunternation.com/2017/04/04/dont-forget-to-nominate-for-the-dragon-awards/
April 4, 2017 general

Nominate Your Favorites for the Dragon Awards!


June 12, 2017 general

http://www.superversivesf.com/2017/03/20/superversive-dragon-award-suggestions/
March 20, 2017 eligibility list

Dragon Awards Are Live


February 6, 2017 Recommendations

http://amyjmurphy.com/2017-dragon-award-nominations/
May 31, 2017 Recommendation

http://russellnewquist.com/2017/06/2017-dragon-award-nominations/
June 6, 2017 Recommendations

Towers of Earth Eligible for Nomination for 2017 Dragon Award; Nominations Open Until June 24, 2017


May 30, 2017 Recommendation

http://www.declanfinn.com/2017/05/hunting-dragon-award.html
May 10, 2017 Recommendations

http://www.guthron.com/blog/2017/4/11/vote-for-rise-for-a-dragon-award
April 11, 2017 Recommendation

Dragon Award Nominations Still Open!


June 20, 2017 Recommendation and eligibility

http://delarroz.com/?p=896
April 26, 2017 Recommendations

http://www.brianniemeier.com/2017/06/dragon-big-you-small.html
2017/06/29 Recommendation

Search 2:

Catholic Dragon Award Suggestions


June 20, 2017 Recommendation

A Very Special Message About Pooka Related Sadness


January 12, 2017 recommendations

http://dawnwitzke.com/index.php/2017/05/30/the-dragons-are-coming-and-they-are-going-to-be-awesome/
May 30, 2017, recommendations

DRAGON AWARD NOMINATION


8 November, 2016 recommendations

2017 Dragon Awards Nominations


April 28, 2017 recommendation

http://lukechmilenko.com/2017/dragoncon/
1 May 2017 recommendation

http://louantonelli.blogspot.com.au/2017/06/just-month-left.html
June 25 2017 recommendation

http://happyfrogs.org/2017/06/23/happy-frogs-official-dragon-award-recommendations/
June 23 2017 Recommendation

Search 3:

6 April 2017 Recommendation

https://voxday.blogspot.com.au/2017/06/dragon-award-del-arrozs-recs.html
June 26, 2017 Recommendations

There maybe additional promotions occuring in eco-systems like Goodreads and Facebook. I only got one Facebook hit from a general search and no Goodreads hits.

[ETA] Others found later:

https://paigelchristie.com/books/
Date Unknown, but it uses the icon from the banner’s page to let people nominate the book. (via Greg Hullender)

Using the banner graphic as an image search proved largely unhelpful as the flames they used are a widely used stock image.

dragontext

I cropped out the flames and searched on the image with just the text elements.

That got me only one new hit:

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewnews.asp?id=46489&AuthorID=191647
April 19, 2017

From JJ:

http://lenkaslist.com/blogger-richard-paolinelli-2017-dragon-award-nominations
A repost from Paolinelli’s WordPress blog (below), Recommendations

https://scifiscribe.com/2017/04/28/2017-dragon-award-nominations/
April 28, 2017 Recommendation

http://injusticegamer.blogspot.com/2017/06/dragon-award-2017-recommendations.html
June 4, 2017 Recommendations

http://www.fimfiction.net/blog/697218/the-2017-dragon-award-nominations-are-open
December 9, 2016 General

Dragon Awards Opens Voting


6 May, 2017 General

 

*[…and to be honest ‘more general discussion’ was File 770, links to File 770, Cora’s blog, this blog and a review of last years winners by Doris Sutherland.]
**[…It’s actually a poor name choice as a consequence.]

camestrosfelapton

73 responses to “Trawling for Dragon Links”

  2. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again–fixing the Dragons is never going to be as “entertaining” for the Pups as meddling with the Hugos was, because it is effortless and cheap, and at the bottom of things, exposes what a shallow mess their entire cause was.

    Liked by 1 person

    • They might get more satisfaction out of it, since they can rig it so easily and make all sorts of spurious claims since no data is ever released.

      OTOH, they like painting themselves as oppressed martyrs, so if the Dragons continue to go Puppy, they don’t get to do that. If the Dragons go complete right-wing/Puppy, then they’re competing against each other and rut-roh.

      If the cosplaying queer girls of D*C ever get involved, Puppies are in big trouble. But since the con’s making no effort to promote the awards (and apparently isn’t doing anything more than hosting the web page and paying for the chunks of glass), I’d bet most of the attendees don’t even know they exist. Which last year’s video of the awards presentation showed.

      Anybody who votes for JdA has obviously never interacted with him, or interacted with those who did. He ain’t getting votes from California fandom, that’s for sure.

      It looks good for JCW this year — with both Teddy and the RW Catholics heavily involved. All the Catholics I know personally are Democrats, into trade unions and sanctuary cities — but then there’s the big JCW/Bill Donohue holier-than-Francis contingent.

      Liked by 1 person

        • I don’t get why you’d be puzzled, Jon. You’ve adopted the Cernovich model of self-promotion and I can see why it is attractive – self-doubt is one of those psychological barriers that can be particulalry derailing for an aspiring writer and Cernovich’s rehash of the power-of-positive-thinking might help somebody barrel past it. But pissing people off is all part of that package – in particular, elevating minor issues into major spats.

          Liked by 1 person

        • Jon Del Arroz: Y u hate so much? I don’t even know who you are.

          Whether or not you have paid enough attention to be aware of who other people are is irrelevant.

          And in order for people to hate you, you would have to have some importance in their lives. The reality is simply that a lot of people have a very bad opinion of you based on your incredibly poor behavior in recent months.

           
          Jon Del Arroz: I’m nice to most folk… I’m generally very fun and personable — especially in person at conventions.

          Your opinion of you is not important to others. You do not get to decide whether you are “nice”, or whether you are “fun and personable” — those judgments are up to other people who have interacted with you.

          What’s important to others is their opinion of you. After seeing you repeatedly harass various people on Twitter, then brag about harassing people on Twitter; seeing you lie repeatedly on File 770 and on Twitter and on your blog, I’m sure that it can’t possibly be a surprise to you that there are a lot of people who don’t think you are “nice to most folk”.

          (And frankly, I know a number of people who behave nicely in person when they have to look people in the eye, but who are nevertheless complete and utter assholes — so your claims that you behave well in person 1) are highly dubious to begin with, given the ample evidence of your reprehensible behavior online, and 2) even if true, do not mitigate your incredibly bad behavior online.)

          It took me a while to decide whether you were just incredibly socially incompetent and stupid, or whether you’re a deliberately malicious person who plays stupid in an attempt to give yourself plausible deniability. After seeing you publicly post plans to harass SFF authors, seeing you engage in this harassment, seeing you then brag about having engaged in this harassment, and seeing you brag about getting 4chan to do a DDOS attack on File 770, it’s become very obvious that you are a malicious troll (though that does not rule out you being incredibly socially incompetent and stupid as well).

          Liked by 1 person

      • I don’t have any major spats with anyone to my knowledge. I’m nice to most folk. I don’t know who LurkerType is so I can’t say why she’s got such an issue with me. I’m generally very fun and personable — especially in person at conventions.

        Like

        • I’m also nice to people and I’m also fun & personable – doesn’t mean I haven’t pissed off a lot of people online. They might be wrong to be pissed off with me but I’m not mystified as to *why* they are pissed off with me.

          Are you seriously saying you don’t know why people might feel antipathy towards you regarding things you’ve said over the past few months or are you doing a thing?

          Liked by 1 person

      • Absolutely I’m saying that. BayCon went overly political, I didn’t attack anyone in that. I just made suggestions that it was a bad thing for a con, don’t do that. It got really personal in return and the politicization doubled down. Opposite of what I was calling out for!

        Beyond that, haven’t really attacked anyone. I’ve been attacked plenty. Easier to get along! Support your diverse authors in being allowed to have their own opinions! That’s what y’all stand for.

        Like

        • You don’t think Baycon and others might see it differently? Note, I’m not asking you to say that their perspective is correct but whether you can see that others may see what you said as both untrue & as an attack?
          Then consider your more recent campaign to ‘troll’ ‘SJW’s on Twitter? Do you not think people might see that less as a fun jape and more as a kind of attack?

          Liked by 1 person

      • A couple of the organizers of BayCon from last year are probably really upset with me, though they should have worked with me instead of trying to ostracize me because of my vote. And then should have listened to my criticism instead of going hog wild on the internet then producing a program steeped in politics. I can’t help that, I only try to help fandom and the genre. Most the people contrarily who hang at BayCon are very much my friends, and actually unlike what LurkerType said, have voted Star Realms: Rescue Run for a Dragon like a lot of people have.

        As far as twitter, so what if I tag people who wrote awful things about me with my book? Don’t write awful things about me if you don’t want that. I only was positive or talked about their direct comments even still. I’m very much a nice guy, just a lot of bigotry out there. We can work together to end that!

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      • Oh, Jonny, everyone’s tried to explain to you, but you refuse to understand.

        1. You weren’t booted off b/c of who you voted for President.
        2. You were never guaranteed a spot on a panel — the new leadership decided to switch up a lot of panelists.
        3. You weren’t banned from the con — you could have bought a membership and networked/BoF like everyone else.
        4. You were basically unknown outside of right-wing/Puppy-adjacent fandom till you started lying about Baycon.

        I’m surprised a professional writer has such poor reading comprehension. Sad!

        Please read #2 over and over again until it sinks in.

        Nice guys don’t attack others on line, lie about them on Facebook and Twitter, or recruit others to troll.

        Everyone sure got a great laugh out of you claiming to be “the leading Hispanic voice in SF” when this year’s Toastmaster was NYT best-seller/multiple Hugo finalist/hit television show producer Ty Franck, whose mother and grandmother were actual Mexican migrant farm workers.

        I don’t hate you, I just find you amusing in a pathetic sort of way — in absentia. That’s how most people feel about you.

        Hope you enjoyed LibertyCon; it sounds very congenial to you.

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      • Thank you Greg, you pointed out the very astute fact thatt that Glyer intentionally tries to paint me as something negative. JJ is part of that on that site (I don’t know JJ at all!) and File 770 posts very weird thing about me and stirs up authors and the like to say awful things about me — ones I don’t know until they do. It’s not very nice! That’s why I stopped clicking on the site there. Camestros here, as much as he mocks me from time to time, at least seems to have some sort of good humor that is in a good spirit of fun. I respect that.

        Like

      • Oh. Hi Susie. Now I know who you are 🙂 That’s funny in the comments where you pretend to be objective about things as if you didn’t know me VERY well. Now those comments come off as really disingenuous. I don’t hate you though for removing me over, how did you put it on Facebook my “behavior over politics”. Election’s over, chill out!

        Like

      • Uh, my name is not and has never been Susie. Or Susan or Suzi, or anything like that. Not even close. Paranoid much, Jon? I don’t even know anyone named Susie.

        I have never been on the concom, staff, or in any way run anything at Baycon, save one year in the 80’s when I was a gofer.

        I’m just someone who’s been attending the con on my own dime for 25-30 years.

        I don’t even have a Facebook account.

        I have literally never met you. I don’t even recognize you from photos. Never heard of you till your Facebook diatribe.

        Sounds like Susie, whoever she is, knows you pretty well — but I’m not her. She sounds outspoken enough that she wouldn’t hide behind a pseudonym.

        However, “election’s over, chill out” is advice you should take as well — your guy won!

        I’m sure a gentleman such as yourself is sorry for mistaking me for someone else. Awaiting your apology.

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      • If you don’t know me and have never met me, why keep making negative comments about me over and over and over? It gets quite old! But you do sell me books every time, so I suppose I should thank you.

        Like

        • Jon Del Arroz: If you don’t know me and have never met me, why keep making negative comments about me over and over and over? It gets quite old!

          Because you keep lying and harassing and misrepresenting other peoples’ words and behaving incredibly badly online. Do you honestly expect people not to judge you by your absolutely reprehensible online behavior?

          And yes, I agree that your nasty, trolling, lying, harassing online behavior is already way old. Why don’t you just stop doing it — and then people will stop judging you negatively for it.

          Liked by 2 people

      • Jon, look up the definition of a “running gag” and “butt of a joke”. That’s you at this point.

        Anyway, I’ve got some burgers and fries waiting for me.

        (Still waiting for that apology, too. You ought to be nicer to someone who’s supposedly making you money.)

        Like

      • My apologies for offending you, certainly trying to figure out who you were since I keep getting such shade, sure that’s understandable.

        Like

      • JJ – He may not be able to stop doing it. Psychologists have been studying online trolling and addiction to it for a little bit now. Some of it’s considered attractive to those with certain personality traits, like sadism but unable to find a constructive outlet for it in real life. With the internet that person can get enjoyment through offending or causing hurt to others. Trolls even say they’re doing it for the lolz (or kek, which is just another term for lol from a video game).

        There are studies going on about those that do get pleasure from causing grief, and like a drug they’ll chase getting more and more pleasure out of it until they’re posting things that they wouldn’t identify themselves with otherwise. This is enhanced with the online disinhibition effect, where a person becomes less inhibited to what they’d normally do socially because it’s not face-to-face and thus less real. So for some people they might legit get confused why their trolling receives any consequence. They don’t understand why their reprehensible behavior is judged, it’s like a game. You might see those same people say they’re not like that in real life and offline they probably aren’t like that. Online though they’re seeking that bit of pleasure that comes from causing someone else grief, and because of the online inhibition and perception of no consequences, the troll then digs deeper and tries to be more offensive just to get that slight rush. Then that addiction becomes their life, just a sad spiral of trying to get a rise out of anyone just to feel a moment of fleeting pleasure and complete confusion as to why anyone has a problem with that.

        http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886914000324

        Liked by 1 person

        • Matt Y: So for some people they might legit get confused why their trolling receives any consequence. They don’t understand why their reprehensible behavior is judged, it’s like a game. You might see those same people say they’re not like that in real life and offline they probably aren’t like that.

          It’s quite bizarre how he keeps saying, “You don’t know me in real life, so why are you saying negative things about me?” when his online behavior has been so incredibly reprehensible — as if he thinks no one should be allowed to form an opinion of him based on that horrible online behavior.

          My personal opinion is that people who behave like that online are actually like that in real life — they are just too cowardly to look other people in the eye and behave like that in person, where they will have to deal with real-life consequences for it.

          The person they are, their personal character, is no different in real life from the horrible online person — it’s just that the way that they behave in real life is different. The perceived anonymity of the internet just makes them feel safe to express their real character. 😐

          Liked by 1 person

      • To be fair, Jon Del Arroz only posted here in response to a specific attack that mentioned him by name (or by initials, anyway). I wouldn’t really call that trolling.

        I carefully read through a set of articles on his blog and the comments, and nowhere could I find any indication of why he thought he was “blackballed.” Only that he thought he was entitled to be on panels, as he had been in the past four years, and so when he wasn’t on any this year, he rejected their claims that they were trying to let more people participate and that he’d be on panels next year, but no one ever hinted to him that his politics were a problem.

        The biggest thing I got from reading the comments was that this stunt helped him sell copies of his book. Was that the point all along?

        Liked by 1 person

        • ///The biggest thing I got from reading the comments was that this stunt helped him sell copies of his book. Was that the point all along?//

          I assume so. The first fuss was tied in with promoting Star Realms:Rescue Run and the second (which included stuff at F770 & hassling Cat Rambo etc) was in the lead up to the release of Steam & Country.

          Liked by 1 person

        • greghullender: The biggest thing I got from reading the comments was that this stunt helped him sell copies of his book. Was that the point all along?

          He may have experienced a small initial surge of people buying his book as a way to “stick it to the SJWs” who had supposedly denied him a place on Baycon programming due to his personal politics. But the problem with outrage marketing is that there’s a limited customer base of people who will spend money for that reason, and there are a lot of outrage marketers vying for their attention and dollars.

          Every day there’ll be a new outrage to focus on, and those customers will move on to other things which provide novelty and a new outrage “rush”. It’s pretty difficult for someone to sustain their outrage audience on an ongoing basis, because they’ll have to keep upping the ante to do that.

          The other problem with outrage marketing is that a lot of people who will shell out for a book for that reason won’t bother reading the book. They bought it because it satisfied their sense of “sticking it to the SJWs”, not because they were actually intererested in reading it.

          So the outrage marketer is going to struggle to build a loyal fanbase, because they’re not acquiring customers who love the book for itself and will diligently keep an eye out for, and buy, subsequent books.

          Liked by 2 people

    • Yup yup yup. “Vote early and often” says it all, as does the fact that at one point Vox had to remind the mignonettes that they had to use “real” email addresses when they voted. Evidently they couldn’t even be bothered to do that much while they were busily stuffing the ballot box last year.

      Liked by 2 people

      • For Vox it is win-win. He has no good reputation to ruin by campaigning. The opportunity cost for him is low. He has enough minions to probably at least get stuff nominated (assuming things are not much better than last year). And it is free publicity with other people doing the work.
        Any non-Rabid who then promotes the Dragons ends up working for Vox’s agenda regardless.

        Liked by 1 person

      • Oh, sure Teddy boy loves it. Teddy is one of two Trump fans who absolutely gets where the man is coming from–the other married Ivanka–and seeks cheap forms of meaningless validation the way a lap dog seeks belly rubs. But the Rabid rank and file don’t seem to feel it the way they do the Hugo vandalizing.

        Liked by 1 person

  3. As Sarah Hoyt pointed out in her old post, independently published books have a big problem attracting audiences. Without the filter of big publishers and book stores, how are readers supposed to ever find them? Sifting through 1,000,000 self-published novels per year (99% of them total trash) just isn’t possible.

    So her idea of designing awards for the best indie books really does make a lot of sense, provided it’s not just a gimmick designed to promote the works of a small group of people and/or a single small publisher.

    Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the Dragon Awards seem to be at the moment. The big question that someone ought to ask the organizers of Dragon Con is exactly why they’re allowing their name to be used for this.

    Liked by 1 person

    • greghullender: The big question that someone ought to ask the organizers of Dragon Con is exactly why they’re allowing their name to be used for this.

      That’s what I keep thinking, too. It seemed apparent last year, when Finn published the finalist list before the official announcement and he was missing books which were on the official list, that DragonCon had realized it had a clusterf*ck on its hands and had intervened (and it looked to me as though they may have intervened by throwing out some of the logrolling votes on the final winners, too).

      They paid several thousand dollars for the trophies last year (unless part of the deal with the Puppies  people who had volunteered to create and manage the awards was that they would be paying for the trophies themselves), and the way the awards were run (boilerplate sweepstakes rules, continually changing rules, ability to be easily logrolled, complete lack of promotion except amongst Puppies, negligible attendance at awards ceremony) reflected really poorly on DragonCon.

      So I expected that DragonCon would take over the awards this year and do a much better job than last year. But instead, it’s just more of the same lack of organization and incredibly poor management and promotion.

      It’s bizarre that the Puppies don’t seem to realize that being named a finalist for a Dragon Award, at this point, is just a joke, and that’s it’s not going to enhance their reputation any.

      Liked by 1 person

      • I think *some* Puppies are realising that hence some of Hoyt’s odd verbal dancing about awards. If they turn out to be another Rabid Puppy sweep, she can now claim that Vox is ruining it for everybody else (except she won’t use those words). If, on the other hand, it is a mix of Baen + major Star Wars novels etc, she can say “I told you there was no point campaigning”. If somehow John Scalzi wins then they can all claim that us SJWs somehow took over while they were busy arguing.

        The most discombulating outcome would be if a small group of self-published writers the Pups et al had never heard of won! That would be kind of cool…

        Liked by 1 person

      • If I remember right, none of the winners showed up to collect their awards. That was damning.

        I suspect the Puppies want at least one or two high-profile winners in addition to their own stuff. That lets them say “George R.R. Martin won one–it can’t be rigged the way you say.”

        Like

      • @Greg: “If I remember right, none of the winners showed up to collect their awards. That was damning.”

        I know that Rob Daviau, the designer of Pandemic Legacy, which won for best boardgame, wasnt even contacted (neither when he was nominated nor when he won). If the winners are not aware that theyve won, they cant pick up the awards.
        This is another sign, that the Dragon awards were/are poorly managed imho.

        Liked by 1 person

      • I’d say that it reinforces the impression that the awards aren’t meant to be a real thing. Their whole purpose is to help Vox Day promote books from his vanity press. Everything else is just a smokescreen.

        This is also why they don’t release participation numbers. They really don’t want people to know that only one or two hundred people nominated, and that almost all of those nominated exactly the same things.

        Liked by 2 people

      • DragonCon did get Eric Flint to promote the awards, and for a while he did some promoting. Apparently he stopped because of illness, but the promoters of the awards can hardly have foreseen that. So I don’t think it can be a wholly Puppy thing. Also, VD’s nominees didn’t actually win in every category – and in particular not in the graphic, dramatic and game categories, which may have had more of an appeal to DragonCon’s core membership.

        This does leave it a bit puzzling why DragonCon isn’t putting more of an effort into, you know, actually organising the thing. It seems likely it is a bit of private enterprise, but I don’t think it’s a specifically puppyish one – the kind of attitudes that underlie it (‘but why don’t the Hugos actually represent all fans? Why don’t they accurately reflect the whole market?’) aren’t confined to the Puppy community, though they exploited them.

        Liked by 1 person

        • Here is another puzzle: where is Baen? My impression last year with Larry promoting it and Toni W at the awards and Eric Flint taking a role, was that Baen were helping move the awards along. Yet, I’ve seen very little from Baen about the awards since.

          Liked by 2 people

        • Andrew M: It seems likely it is a bit of private enterprise, but I don’t think it’s a specifically puppyish one

          I think that the fact that Finn posted the list of finalists before DragonCon’s official announcement, and that the official list had a couple of works which had been added to what Finn published, indicates that there is at least one Puppy on the inside of the Dragon Awards (who stupidly trusted Finn not to spill the beans before the official announcement).

          In the rules, which were pretty much a clusterf*ck and ended up being changed several times, the original eligibility period was April 15, 2015 to June 30, 2016 (this was later changed to July 1, 2015 to June 30,2016). I would love to know what book the original date range was intended to include. It also seems to me that the reason for the bizarre mid-year eligibility range (which makes it next to impossible for nominators to know which books are or are not eligible) was set up specifically so that certain books from the second half of 2015 would be eligible. This may not be a Puppy ploy — but it sure barks like one.

          Liked by 1 person

      • Well, I don’t get the impression Finn was ever very close to the Puppy leadership; he barged into the SP4 recommendation process (as he was of course perfectly entitled to do, given the way it was set up), but managed to annoy the organisers. I think he has only begun to align himself with RP after falling out with SP – certainly he wasn’t anywhere on VD’s list last year. So in a broad enough sense of ‘Puppy’ there may have been some Puppy involvement, but that just goes to show the vagueness of the concept. (And they did always reserve the right to change the lists; there were mysterious references to panels of experts, though it wasn’t clear if they meant experts on the fields or experts on voting procedures. Of course, this may make us wonder why they didn’t do it more comprehensively.)

        Liked by 1 person

      • Strange. On the one hand you claim the Dragon Awards are meaningless compared to the Hugos. Yet, you all seem to care enough about them to go searching the Internet for every mention of them and devote quite a lot of time attacking them. Worried are we that your suddenly meaningless and quite flaccid little pop rocket has lost its luster?

        Like

        • What do you think is strange here? I’m insterested in how awards work (see numerous posts), I’m interested in what the Puppies are up to (see numerous posts), I’m interested in the recent minor internecine pup arguments (which included references to the Dragons – see numerous posts), people are interested in conventions, science fiction and whole bunch of other stuff.
          And why is every casts as “attacking them”? It’s possible to talk about something, even critically without it being an “attack”. Not every conversation is some kind of verbal warfare – sometimes it is just idle chit-chat.

          //Worried are we that your suddenly meaningless and quite flaccid little pop rocket has lost its luster?//

          No. For two reasons:
          1. It isn’t a zero sum game for awards. The Nebulas are a succesful award but they haven’t made the Hugos LESS succesful anymore than the Clark award or Locus or the Promtheus award have or any of the other many and interesting awards there are. The more awards the better – it engenders MORE interest not less.

          2. …but if that wasn’t true…if somehow it was a zero sum game and the success of the Dragons would lead to a decline in the Hugos (although there is no obvious mechansim how that would occur), the Dragon Awards do not currently look like they are going to be a great success *yet* (things may improve for them).

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      • Actually, I’d say that we’re trying to decide if the Dragon Awards are still irrelevant this year. The fact that they’ve had so little promotion strongly suggests that, but we wanted to be sure they weren’t being promoted in places we don’t usually read. That’s all.

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      • Andrew M: I seem to recall him writing pro-Puppy fanfic in the Great Puppy Kerfluffle of 2015. (Yep, Sad Puppies Bite Back.) So he’s always been hanging around the edges, like a too-eager pup who wants to hang with the cool dogs.

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      • DragonCon did get Eric Flint to promote the awards, and for a while he did some promoting.

        I thought that was a mistake even before Flint fell ill. Yes, Flint is a prominent “big-name” author, but if you’re going to promote something, you should get someone to do it whose primary job is to promote things, not someone who is an interested amateur promoting your product in their spare time. Getting Flint to do it made it seem like it was a side-project level thing, and it limited the promotion to those people who pay attention to Flint’s blogging.

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      • Writer’s Digest apparently sponsors one as well, which has pretty good prizes. There’s something called the Next Generation Indie Book Awards… I dunno, Googling “indie book awards legitimate” turns up a whole bunch of them.

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  4. Declan Finn has a second post:
    http://www.declanfinn.com/2017/05/best-horror-in-dragon-awards-2017.html

    And then there are these:
    http://lenkaslist.com/blogger-richard-paolinelli-2017-dragon-award-nominations
    http://injusticegamer.blogspot.com/2017/06/dragon-award-2017-recommendations.html
    http://www.fimfiction.net/blog/697218/the-2017-dragon-award-nominations-are-open

    Dragon Awards Opens Voting


    http://scifiscribe.com/2017/04/28/2017-dragon-award-nominations

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  5. Nothing of substance to add, just waiting for you to put up a picture of a spooky dragon trawler with nets and stuff.

    Also re: Awards. Happy Canada Day/ Kanata 150+ … This does capture our sensibility quite well.

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  6. I really feel that North America has done their national days right — in the summer so it’s warm and you can do things outside, plus there’s fireworks. If you live along the border, you can do a whole extra-long weekend.

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    • The West German national holiday used to be June 17. Okay, the event commemorated was an odd choice (a failed uprising in East Germany in 1953), but June was a really nice time for a public holiday. Then the unification happened and we ended up with a national holiday for all of Germany on October 3.

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