The gender proportions on the Dragon Awards have shifted over time but they still lean more male than female (see https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2022/08/14/dragon-award-gender-stats/ ). What critics and supporters of the award (or perhaps former critics and former supporters) have noted is that the awards have become more mainstream over time.
The biggest outcry about this was in 2020 but arguably 2020 was an atypical year for everything and anything. I believe there was a “blip” that year but really it was an exaggeration of an ongoing trend.
For the past few years, I’ve been classifying works that are finalists in the award by their publisher. That is harder than it sounds as sources (such as Amazon listings) do not give unique answers to the question of “who published this?” Further complicating matters is that my Australian IP address often leads Amazon to give me the UK/International publisher. I’ve ended up with a four-level classification:
- Publisher 1: who I see listed, typically the imprint it is branded with
- Publisher 2: who that imprint belongs to (e.g. Tor.com is Tor)
- Publisher Group: who that company is owned by (e.g. Tor is Macmillan)
- Size: Big (major companies, companies that buy companies), Medium (notable publishers, with a range of books and authors), Small (everybody else).
The difference between Medium and Small is not well defined here. The boundary is very fuzzy and the criteria is more like “sounds like a company you’d imagine is owned by an even bigger company but isn’t”. Still, if there is a big weak point in the methodology it is here. Baen count as Medium. LMBPN count as Small even though they’ve got quite a roster of authors these days. With huge multinationals owning cute little imprints with niche marketing and self-published authors turning themselves into factories for Kindle Unlimited, publishing likes to pretend everything is medium-sized.
As flawed as the size criteria are, I think they work. The boundary issues add noise but don’t disguise trends. I also haven’t reclassified works or publishers to make the numbers work.
Since 2017, the proportion of works from big publishers has gradually increased. 2020 is a blip but not a major distortion of the trend. Small press and self-published works (the distinction between those two has also become greyer) have declined in a similar way. Trends in medium-sized publishers are less clear.
What does this all mean? On the one hand, it could be taken as evidence of increased participation and/or the nomination stage becoming more swayed by votes rather than curation. On the other, if we take curation as a given, it’s better for publishers like Baen to be seen to be winning awards against major publishers than outfits run out of somebody’s garage.
Baen specifically has had a very wobbly degree of representation, with a high in 2016 at 14% of books, down to 2% in 2020 but settling to around 5% the past couple of years. However, they’ve typically won similar proportions of categories as Tor/Macmillan (usually one each) but overall, slightly more:
| Baen Books | Macmillan/Tor | |
| 2016 | 14.29% | 14.29% |
| 2017 | 14.29% | 14.29% |
| 2018 | 28.57% | 28.57% |
| 2019 | 42.86% | 14.29% |
| 2020 | 14.29% | 14.29% |
| 2021 | 16.67% | 0 |
| Grand Total | 21.95% | 14.63% |
2019 Baen had wins in two headline categories and MilSF.
I’m less inclined towards the “it’s all rigged” hypothesis at the final vote stage. That stage is more competently done and the roll-over of voter emails bypasses the otherwise bumbling publicity. Of the two, it is the nomination stage with all its faults, that is the dodgiest and yet, increasingly that looks like what we might expect from a popular vote with a slightly Baen-skewed voter base.
Of course, without any voting figures, there is not much to go on. The lack of figures for any stage of voting makes it very hard to dismiss that the finalists and winners are just picked by one guy. However, if it is a tiny jury picking the winners, their picks have become more like what we would expect from a popular vote.
Camestros Felapton 
2 responses to “How the Dragon Awards went mainstream”
Well some of that makes sense. For instance, the non-Puppy self-pub authors found the Dragon Awards in their second and third years and made a big push with their mailing lists to get votes then. But they didn’t get much in the way of wins and DragonCon doesn’t publicize the award much outside of some convention materials, as we’ve seen. So their participation is still on-going but they became less interested — their participation is less organized and results dropped in number past 2018. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if we see an uptick in their involvement later, past the height of the Covid years, with the awards going to big name wins and maybe more media attention in future years.
Baen sort of tried to distance themselves from the Puppies for the first few years of the Dragons while still being a supportive publisher of them. So they weren’t really making big efforts to publicize titles to get Dragon noms at first. They let the Puppies themselves go to town on it. But in 2019, there was maybe more rumblings from Baen and their online operations once the Dragons were established. It is possible that helped Brad T. win that year for SF. Remember how that seemed odd after the patterns of the first three years? And of all the authors out there trying to rally fans, Baen and their authors most understood how to register for the Dragons and actually vote for nominations and for the award finalists, whereas the Dragons administrator tends to keep it hidden from the rest of the population with little in the way of announcements and reminders. That might have given Baen an advantage in 2019.
But in 2020, we had Covid and no publishers were doing a lot of publicizing and getting people interested was difficult. So the best known authors, who tended to be either published by the big presses from the start or migrated to the big presses, were logically the ones who got picked by the most dedicated fans of DragonCon. That may also have been a year where, ahem, given 2019’s results, that DragonCon’s conrunners pressured the administrator to stop favoring certain parties in nominations and make the awards look more legitimate. They were trying to keep everything going till the pandemic could be over. 2020 was also the fifth year of the Dragons — it was more established and more authors who had ignored the Dragons or hadn’t even known they existed, were willing — desperate in the covid times — to try to get their fans to vote. Because it became a more established, better known award, the big press books which have the highest distribution naturally were doing pretty well the last few years.
I don’t think that’s a trend that will reverse. I think the Dragons will remain friendly to medium and small/self-pub authors if they can beat the drums enough, but since they don’t have any awards for short fiction, there’s only so much of that going to happen. Tor has never particularly tried to do a push for the Dragon Awards and this year the other bigs did well and they didn’t get any nominations. Which is an interesting thing, but we’ll have to wait another year or so to see if it’s more than the luck of the draw in one year.
So again, all this data is very much on track for what was a half-scheme by disgruntled conservatives/half experimental let’s have a book award for DragonCon that has never been effectively or legitimately run but has managed to stick around long enough that it’s started to seem like a regular award of a giant media convention. And so it has developed voting patterns (assuming those votes are at least partly honored by the administrator) of other similar awards.
LikeLiked by 3 people
[…] ETA: Camestros Felapton has also analysed the gender breakdown of Dragon Award finalists and winners (short version: The Dragons still skew male, though less than they used to) and traces how the Dragon Awards went mainstream. […]
LikeLike