Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Fan v Pro v Fanzine

The indefatigable Hugo Book Club have a lengthy discussion on the issue of the fan v pro distinction in the Hugo Awards. It is a knotty issue but an important one for the Hugos precisely because the single most notable feature of the awards is that they include both professional works and fan activity.

As Olav & Amanda note:

“There is no easy solution to this dilemma, no set of rules that will ever be able to parse out what should be considered as fannish activity from that which is not. When it comes to what should count as fan works, we should avoid the temptation to take the same approach that United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart took on obscenity: “I know it when I see it”

https://hugoclub.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-gordian-knot-of-fan-vs-pro.html

The post covers the issues but with no obvious fannish razor to neatly slice pro from fan, the conclusion rest with trusting the voters. There is a lot of merit in that but it remains an issue with two related problems. The topic keeps coming up because fan categories are of interest to people who discuss the Hugo Awards, thus drawing more column inches than votes. However, it is also closely related to several other knotty issues within the Hugo eligibility rules:

  • The pro-artist v fan-artist distinction
  • The semiprozine definition
  • The scope of Best Related Work (specifically the degree to which blog posts end up as finalists in this category)
  • The meaning of “fancast”
  • The meaning of “fan writer”
  • The nature of “fanzine”

Historically, these issues have been playing out for decades and in some cases (e.g. the existence of fancast as a category). Specific sore spots in Hugo history include John Scalzi’s win as a Fan Writer when he was already a notable professional author. In 2019 an editorial in the trad-fanzine Beam attributed the Scalzi win as a breaking point for the Hugo Awards:

“Wait, what now? Why am I still on about John Scalzi’s Fan Writer Hugo, eleven years after the parade? Because it was John Scalzi who finally broke the Fan Hugos, that’s why. And he didn’t do the rest of the Hugos any favors, either, as it turns out. So while I don’t care a great deal about the Hugos in themselves, I do care about fandom. This creeping metamorphosis of the Fan Hugos into the lower bar minor leagues for baby-pro also-rans has gone viral in the years since Scalzi decided to huxter himself a fan Hugo, and that denigrates and undermines fandom – fandom the culture, fandom the gift economy, fandom the self-aware social structure –the one that traces its history back to the letter columns of the old pulp SF prozines.”

Ulrika O’Brien, Beam ISSUE #14 : MAY 2019

That debate led to two posts by me, one addressing the specific question of whether John Scalzi opened the gate for the Puppies and another in which I tried to untangle a distinction between commercial and non-commercial venues.

The Beam article has its issues but it covers a lot of the territory and history. Prior to that, I had written some different thoughts on the nature of fan writing in 2018.

This year we had various degrees of discussion/objections in various places that touch on these issues:

  • In Best Fanzine: Small Gods by Lee Moyer and Seanan McGuire — mainly due to McGuire being seen as a professional author)
  • In Best Fancast: Our Opinions Are Correct, presented by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, produced by Veronica Simonetti — both in terms of the extent to which it is a commercial enterprise (unclear) but also the relative fame of the presenters.
  • In Best Fan Writer: Alex Brown’s work being primarily a Tor.com column
  • Proposed rule changes around pro-artist and fan-artist categories.
  • Proposed rule changes attempting to define “fan” and “pro” more generally in the awards.

The first three also raise a basic problem with the general debate on the categories. Rule changes or questions of eligibility are intertwined with actual finalists and actual winners. In some cases, the discussion is fueled by genuine attempts to clarify the rules and in other cases fueled by personal antipathy to the finalists. The antipathy can flow in multiple directions, e.g. the Beam article quoted above lays personal blame on John Scalzi but that antipathy arises out of a genuine (if confused IMHO) view about the award categories.

It’s important to separate out those elements. We can recognise the obvious legitimacy of winners and finalists under one set of rules and norms but still look to new rules and new norms that will better suit the awards in the future. It is still important though to consider actual examples though because they illustrate some of the issues.

For example, in the first two cases that I listed in the dot-points above, the underlying issue appeared to be a perceived lack of a level playing field. Seanan McGuire is famous! Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders are famous! I get that and I can see how that feels like the scales are tilted against the other nominees but that’s not something fixable directly in an award based on a popular vote.

It does though get at one aspect of what I think fuels a lot of the controversy around these categories: the degree to which the down-ballot categories in general represent a different weight class.

The only way I can see a way around that in principle (although I can’t imagine how it would work administratively) is for nominees to self-identify as either pro or fan and then be ineligible for the other category. As I said, administratively that would be a nightmare as it would need to be in advance of the finalist announcement and ideally earlier. You’d also need a window broader than a single year so that potential finalists didn’t just osscilate between the two depending on what they thought there best chances were. It also wouldn’t really deal with the definitional issues. Potential finalists would want guidance on the distinction and that takes us back around to defining the difference!

But…there is a germ of an idea there that gets at the idea of fairness. It also pushes the edge-case problem onto the nominees. I’m also mindful of it because of the third dot point above. To me, Alex Brown was a clearly worthy finalist in the category of Fan Writer and not just by the letter of the rules but also in the spirit of the rules. Her columns to me fit within the broad genre of fan writing. So that’s all good! Oh…but…but…I had previously objected to the idea of Tor.com columns being seen as fan writing! Thus, caught in a contradiction I implode in a ball of smoke and forlon beeps as my computer voice drawls out “does not compute”.

What I suggested back in 2019 was something like this:

3.3.16: Best Fan Writer. Any person whose writing has appeared in semiprozines or fanzines or in generally available electronic media THAT IS NOT PROFESSIONALLY EDITED OR PROFESSIONALLY CURATED during the previous calendar year.

https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/06/28/about-tor-com-fanwriting/

I think I was also trying to get at that weight-class idea and I think there’s still merit to that point. Tor.com publishes some stuff that if the writer had published to their personal blog or fanzine, we wouldn’t question that it is fan writing (or for an even narrower set of people, if they had published it in a photocopied booklet available by mail). Excluding people from being eligible as fan writers because a big corporation gave them a platform isn’t a step forward.

A different view I’ve had on fan v pro is the extent to which the argument really is a means to avoid defining what a fanzine is. If we could define “fan publication/fanzine” with a broad definition, then a distinction could flow from there. Fan writing is writing in fan publications, fan art is art in fan publications, a fancast is a fan publication in the form of a podcast! Problem solved! Peace in our time. You can all thank me later.

Of course, all I’ve done is swap a can of worms for a nest of wasps.

But seriously, I think the current knot arises out of an unwillingness to redefine what a fanzine is. Functionally, fan arist and fan writer arose out of fanzine culture where fanzine didn’t need a definition. To a lesser degree the mess around semi-prozine arises there as well. There’s an intuitive sense of three grades of platforms were stuff happens: professional, fan and somewhere in between (a labour of love that aspires to be a going concern).

There are many available dimensions but none by themselves capture the essence of the fanzine distinction:

  • profit v non-profit
  • paywall v open access
  • corporate v non-corporate
  • size – number of people involved in the endeavour
  • fiction v non-fiction
  • hobby v “job”
  • weight class – a mix of size, influence and professional demeanour I guess
  • paying writers or not
  • paying staff or not
  • general vibe

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

commercial-corporate v. non-commericial-corporate gets closest to a distinction but not one that I could convert into a sensible set of rules.

Which means that I must circle back to the notion of self-identification as fan or pro. That also has tricky cases (a pro-writer who is a fan artists or vice versa) but if the point is to address the weight-class idea then maybe that is the least problematic pain point to accept. Put another way, if we see the “original sin” of John Scalzi’s* fan writer win not as blogs v print fanzines, not as style of genre question (clearly it was in the genre of fan writing), not as whether he is a real fan (clearly he is), but as a question of whether the voting is distorted because he had a large voting base in the Hugo Awards and major name recognition…then self-identification for the purpose of award eligibility gets at that issue.

Would it help multiple issues? I’m not sure. The current pro/fan artist issue is one that I believe hurts the category because it essentially discourages people nominating in the categories because people don’t understand the rules. Historically people can be finalists in both categories and a self-identification rule would end that, perhaps unfairly if we accept in principle that people can be both. A strong fanzine definition, alternatively, would allow for people to be finalists in both if they have eligible work in fanzine and eligible work in non-fanzines…but “a strong fanzine definition” is likely to be impossible. I feel like artists not being eligible in both categories is a relatively small sacrifice in the circumstance.

How might it work? Informally, people could make the distinction when discussing award eligibility. Formally, it could only feasibly be at the stage where nominees are notified that they are finalists. Hard to see how that wouldn’t be a mess for a bunch of people, particularly if you had to commit to one label or the other for a couple of years.

The change would also mean categories we informally think of as “pro” categories would need to be formalised as such. That sounds a bigger problem than it is though. For example, if Best Related Work was defined as a “pro” category then as I’m a fan writer Debarkle wouldn’t have been eligible but if the essence of the rule is self-identification rather than strict criteria, I could still classify as “pro” for the purpose of Debarkle but by doing so disqualify myself from Fan Writer (or vice versa).

There would still be edge cases though. As noted above, the 2022 winner of Best Fanzine was Small Gods by Lee Moyer and Seanan McGuire. Moyer also won in a fan category (fan artist) and McGuire in what we might call a pro category (Best Series). How would the rules apply with self-identification as fan or pro? Would the fanzine be ineligible if McGuire identified as a pro so she could compete in other categories? Seems unfair on Moyer in that case. Or would the fanzine be eligible but McGuire personally would not be (i.e. only Moyer would have won a Hugo for the fanzine) – that just feels weird. Alternatively, given that both McGuire and Moyer won Hugo Awards regardless, was the issue already taken care of by the variety of categories?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Either way, there won’t be change that 100% avoids new issues. The question really becomes what kind of new issues do we prefer.

*[Picking on John Scalzi here mainly because I don’t think he’ll mind and because I’d already mentioned the 2019 Beam article and because I think people know that it’s not any kind of personal beef.]

camestrosfelapton

45 responses to “Fan v Pro v Fanzine”

  1. The Beam editorial seems a bit off target by 2019.
    Sure, there was a point when the Scalzi and Pohl wins had made it seem that “Best Fan Writer” was becoming “Pro with best blog” but that was over by then. The category reset during the Puppy era.
    Is anything though, that category was broken by being “Best writer called Dave Langford” for 19 years
    .

    Liked by 5 people

  2. The category of “fan writer” does seem to be the one most likely to be affected by ‘name recognition’ though? It feels as though it is very distinct from the other categories tbh. (I mean, I don’t think it’s especially controversial to suggest that, say, Dave Langford’s run was probably assisted by that as it went on.)

    Perhaps the solution is actually to kill all the fiction categories and just have “Best Pro Writer” instead? {this is a joke}

    Liked by 3 people

    • I’d contend Fancast is at least as much affected as Fan Writer – 4 out of 6 finalists this year are hosted by people I’d consider to be pros, and a quick glance at the finalists for the other post-Puppy years shows about 50/50.

      (FWIW, I see very few pros in the nominations-below-cutoffs in that category for those year though, although I’m not very familiar with a lot of those nominees.)

      Liked by 3 people

  3. In 1970, Piers Anthony was up for Best Novel (Macroscope) and Best Fan Writer, by the way. I blame Scalzi for this of course (he was born, after all)

    Liked by 5 people

  4. In 2019 an editorial in the trad-fanzine Beam attributed the Scalzi win as a breaking point for the Hugo Awards

    Note that the author of the Beam article has frequently complained in recent years about finalists and winners in the fan categories, saying that they couldn’t possibly be real fan writers/artists/zines because she’d never even heard of them. 🙄

    For her, the fan categories are broken because the people she grew up with in fandom are no longer being nominated for, or winning, the fan awards.

    Liked by 6 people

  5. Small Gods by Lee Moyer and Seanan McGuire (mainly due to McGuire being seen as a professional author)

    Moyer is also seen as a professional, having been Artist Guest of Honor at many cons including Norwescon, Arisia, Balticon, Keycon, Baycon, Bubonicon, Miscon, and Convolution. His art has appeared on the covers of trad-pubbed books by Banks, Swanwick, McDevitt, Farmer, Haldeman, Kiernan, Turtledove, WJW, and McGuire (many of these have been Subterranean Press Special Editions).

    “His art has been exhibited at the Smithsonian and galleries in NYC, LA, and London. Among his acclaimed posters are world premieres for Stephen Sondheim, John Mellencamp, and Stephen King, as well as art for Tori Amos, Amanda Palmer, and the von Trapps. His work includes Laurel & Hardy films, Spider-Man 2, and Call of Cthulhu. In collaboration with Ray Bradbury, George RR Martin and Neil Gaiman, Moyer designed and painted three literary calendars that raised six figures for charity.”

    Moyer is a Pro Artist as much as McGuire is a Pro Writer.

    Liked by 3 people

  6. Over on File 770, Cassy B. made an interesting suggestion which I feel has a lot of merit:

    my take on “best fan artist” and “best pro artist” is that we should keep the two categories, but make it

    “Best Cover or Illustrative Artist” (to replace Best Pro Artist, since it’s almost exclusively book cover art that is nominated in this category), and
    “Best Artist for Other than Cover or Illustrative Art” which covers almost all of work nominated for “fan artist”, and includes things like sculpture and jewelry.

    Just my two cents, and naturally the language might need to be refined, but then the voter doesn’t have to try to figure out if the artist counts as “fan” or “professional”

    Liked by 2 people

    • I think that could work for artist as long as there’s a clarification in the rules that professionally published comic book art is pro artist. I can’t think of a comic book artist being nominated for a Hugo, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t be in principle.

      Liked by 2 people

  7. I think the general principle I would want is that a professional creator working in their professional capacity is a pro – so a writer writing work for professional publication, an artist working on professional commissions, etc.

    Fan creation is creation by a fan for the fun of the creation – they may or may not get paid to some extent for that which they have created, but they have written or drawn or whatever because they want to do so and they want to share with other fans. That fan may also be a pro, but anything they create in their fan capacity is fan creation not pro creation.

    The problem is that those are archetypes, not definitions. Professional reviews of new sff are a genre of writing that is clearly pro, but there are also enormous numbers of amateur reviews of sff – and not necessarily of new sff either, which is obviously fan writing. And then there are the bookbloggers/booktubers, who become influential enough that publishers send them review copies and ARCs, while they gradually build up Patreon income. At what point are they pros? Somewhere before they quit their day jobs, I think. But there is also critique (ie writing that expects the reader to have read the book it comments on, as distinct from review which doesn’t). There isn’t a market of any size for critiques of years-old sff novels, but there are plenty of people writing those critiques, some of whom are professional reviewers. Drawing these lines is simultaneously impossible and important, IMO.

    There is also the whole fanfic/fanart phenomenon, which is creative work in a universe that belongs to someone else; the Hugos have traditionally followed the wider principle of not bringing too much attention to that because of the copyright grey area that it exists within.

    Liked by 3 people

    • //The problem is that those are archetypes, not definitions//

      That hits the nail on the head as to why this ends up as a tricky problem. The archetypes are easy to understand but the resist clear definitions.

      Like

  8. Alex Brown doesn’t just write for Tor.com, but also reviews for NPR and Locus, though that doesn’t resolve the issue, since they are presumably paid for those reviews as well. That said, non-fiction published in pro venues like Tor.com pays much less than fiction anyway. Do we really want to disqualify someone from a fan category, because they got 50 or 100 US-dollars for a review or article? Because that seems cruel. Never mind that every single fan writer finalist this year except possibly Chris Barkley also made money from their work.

    Also, the problem is far from new. Jack Gaughan won both fan and pro artist in the same yar, 1967.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Hmm, what’s frustrating to me about this is that Tor and Locus feel more intrinsically fannish to me than NPR but I’d have a really hard time drawing a line between them. “Likelihood of running into person from $publication at a Worldcon party” isn’t a workable standard.

      Liked by 3 people

      • NPR does seem to be genre-friendly for a general media outlet. Wasn’t the late Petra Mayer, who won a special Nebula this year, one of their journalists? But yes, Locus and Tor.com feel more fannish, because they focus on SFF.

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  9. Just to add to the messiness, the overwhelming majority of SF/F-related social media posts technically count as fan writing given that their authors are generally not paid for them. (There are obviously some exceptions.) And there’s no minimum word count or anything for Fan Writer. Which means that basically everybody is technically eligible—even if their actual substantive writing that most people are voting on (and that ends up in the Hugo Packet) is in a professional publication or (by some other criterion) something else that we might not consider fan writing.

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    • This is not really a problem as long as voters understands the difference between “eligible” and “the best”, and agrees that the intention of Best Fan Writer is to honor the person who is best at fan writing, not “person I like best who have written at least one sentence that’s fan writing”.

      Sure, writing this comment makes me eligible for Best Fan Writer for next year’s Hugo, but if anyone tries to say it makes me the best fan writer in 2022, I’d say they’re bonkers.

      But I have sometimes wondered if it would be useful to write up some kind of actually official “voting guideline” that states more explicitly things like
      – In categories like Best Novel and Best Short Story, voters should make their choices based on that particular novel or story and not other works by the same author.
      – In categories like Best Editor and Best Fan Artist, voters should make their choices based on the person’s body of work that qualifies them for that category, and not other things they’ve done.
      – In categories like Best Editor and Best Fan Artist, voters should make their choices based on work from the year in question, not their lifetime achievements.

      Liked by 3 people

      • The intent of those guidelines is great and logical. But telling voters what they should do and even issuing guidelines in hopes that a majority of voters will do what you want, is not very likely to work. The Puppies tried it, for one. Their main complaint was that voters were not voting in the way that they felt Hugo voters should vote. And they set up voting slates because voters were told that they shouldn’t create voting slates but doing so wasn’t against the rules and requirements of voting, so they hoped to create a voting block of voters who would behave as they wanted, in their favor.

        Essentially, if you don’t want voters to do something, you have to make it against the rules. Which for voter intent is nearly impossible. Again, the Hugos are rather unique when it comes to awards in that core, regular voters in WorldCon do have a shared sense of responsibility to sample the nominees before voting on finalists. It is doubly remarkable that this is the voting culture
        considering WorldCon is a revolving convention that has a different overall make-up of voters each year, in multiple countries. So already regular Hugo voters are way more responsible and informed than voters for pretty much almost any other set of SFF awards. They do focus on works over the creators far more than the voters of a lot of other awards.

        But even they are influenced by what they know of nominees’ larger body of works. And they develop long time liking of various creators so that, to them, a non-fiction work by a pro fiction author may indeed seem to be the best because overall they like what that author produces more than some one piece produced by another writer they don’t know all that well. And so clusters of the same names nominated or winning do happen in the Hugos and Langford won for a phenomenal number of years. So guidelines could certainly remind voters of the voting culture of the Hugos and inform newer ones — doesn’t hurt, but likely still wouldn’t produce any significant change to these fan categories.

        But I do think these categories are worth still keeping for the Hugos, even though the world has changed and fandom is huge, and even if Hugo voters don’t have as much time to familiarize themselves with them and so vote for them less and sometimes lean towards voting for fame. Because they highlight some of the things that set the category SFF field apart and has kept it far more afloat than other areas of fiction during hard times — a love and appreciation for fine arts in partnership with SFF writing, a deep connection and on-going dialogue with SFF fans (and more of all the fans globally now than before,) a broad community of fandom where creation of all sorts and appreciation of those creations occurs constantly, from people who create entire sets of cosplay armor to Nobel Prize winning writers like Doris Lessing. The fan awards are about the joy and thoughtful exploration of the field, not simply for prestige, it seem to me, and that has value.

        And the concerns about those awards is that fans with less fame and platforms — who are meant to be honored — are getting shut out of them, and that’s a valid concern. But that does put the onus on the awards themselves to figure out eligibility requirements that are reasonably fair and don’t just default to famous and pro names. I don’t think you can put the onus on the voters to do it, as they are an ever changing group and already, overall, appear to be giving it their best shot to be responsible and open.

        Liked by 2 people

  10. The old magazine and pro requirements systems that they used in originally creating the Fan categories, back long before the Internet, have basically been gone for awhile (not counting the more recent Fancast award.) The magazine industry radically changed. They want to keep the fan categories around to celebrate the creativity and insight of fans but the blurry lines are way more blurry. They used to in fandom have the lists of what were the acceptable magazines to be considered pro sales outlets for like membership in the SFWA, but they had to toss those. Fan artists showed off their paintings at conventions and pro artists sold theirs for book covers.

    But in a world now where people can have whole careers as professional cosplayers and publications and analysis can come in many different production forms, how do you draw lines around ever changing fandom? So yeah, they definitely need some sort of overhaul to bring them in line with the 21st century, but what that should consist of is complicated.

    Liked by 4 people

  11. I think that one of the big questions here is the extent to which it is a person or a work that is nominated. If it is a person then we can certainly ask whether they are fan or pro (But does the field matter? Can a pro author be nominated as a fan artist if they’ve done no professional artwork?). At least the question of pro vs fan artist makes some sense in this light,

    If it’s a work or body of work then it seems a bit odd to disqualify it if the creator has also done pro work. And – as said above – more so when there is a mix of pro and non-pro people involved in its creation. Is there really a problem other than name recognition? And does the field matter? Should a professional artist be ineligible for the fan writer award?

    I think that any solution would require quite a significant restructuring of the rules – and is likely to be impractical on those grounds.

    Maybe the solution is to have not-Hugos given only to non-professionals, in analogy to the Olympic Games?

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      • Name recognition always distorts the vote. It distorts the vote for Best Novel, which is why the Puppies’ claims that the Best Novel nominees were obscure instead of all bestsellers/well known names were always the funniest part of their efforts. Name recognition can distort the vote for Best Related Work indirectly too — a bio about a well known author for instance might get more votes and attention than a work on fandom or the field in general, regardless of the name recognition of the author of the author bio. It’s certainly going to distort the vote for best Fancast as ones hosted by well known authors are going to attract more listeners than ones that aren’t.

        Most Hugo award voters are remarkably conscientious about voting on each award only after they’ve sampled all the work under consideration as finalists. That’s why the fan categories get less votes — it’s harder to get ahold of and sample their work and people are less familiar with it initially than with the work of well known authors. It’s sometimes easier to get a look at “fan” work that is done by pro authors, even if it’s not their usual area. So you can’t get around the fact that popularity (and the access that comes with it) will distort award votes. But with the Hugo, you also have voters who sincerely want to make new discoveries and have these fan categories because of that.

        So I don’t think they should jettison them. But it is a harder situation because fan artists and writers now are often making a lot more money off of their creations than they used to do, with wide online distribution. And the borders between fanzines, semiprozines and pro magazines are in large part shredded. Self publishing and self-gallerying for artwork are much bigger industries than they were before and involve a lot of “pros” using those outlets as well. And the old tradition where fan writers or artists end up becoming pros continues. So you can’t nuke name recognition out of any of that, no matter what qualifying lines you implement. It’s a matter of finding the qualifying lines the majority can live with, I guess.

        Liked by 1 person

        • It’s not that hard to get ahold of samples of fan work these days, since the fan category finalists always contribute samples of their work to the voter packet.

          Editor long does suffer from it being vey hard to determine who edited what, let alone what impact the editor had on the finished work.

          Liked by 2 people

          • Yes, the Hugo Packett, oddly enough helped instigated by Scalzi, definitely helped a lot, but even with that, better known people’s “fan” work is going to be more widely known and distributed and skew the voting. The only way you can maybe sort of get rid of name recognition skewing results is to have a juried award, not a voting group.

            And Editor Long Form was because Jim Baen wanted an award and complained a lot. People at WorldCon do know and like book editors and want to honor them. But book editors, while they provide invaluable help to individual titles and work their asses off, are not creating a mosaic art work of their own like magazine and anthology editors do by putting together whole groups of curated stories in relation to each other. And there are definitely very big job differences between editors at big publishing houses and editors at small ones. So logically it is one that they should dump. I would say to keep it if it actually helped book editors in their careers but I remember vividly one young, much praised editor at Tor winning the award one year and then soon after getting laid off with a bunch of other editors.

            Liked by 2 people

        • //Name recognition always distorts the vote. It distorts the vote for Best Novel,//

          True but somebody with 100 loyal fans gets a proportionally small boost to their Best Novel nomination but a proportionally massive boost to fan writer etc

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          • Yes, but that again has always been the case. Which is why Langford kept winning year after year in the past. It’s never going to be fair. You have to pay to vote — that’s not fair either. The only way you could try to counter the larger fanbase issue would be to insist that voters have to vote for every category in order to vote for any — so no low turnout award categories.

            But that full slate policy would counter the Hugo ethos that voters should look at every nominee in any category they vote on. Voters who wanted to vote on short fiction, Best Novel or the drama presentations would just start voting for whoever in the fan categories, without sampling them, to be able to have a full slate. (That’s essentially what the Puppies did with their voting slates — they just tossed in a bunch of stuff and told the Gamergaters to vote for it. That’s why they threw in Chuck Tingle against his will.)

            So you’d counter the I have 100 loyal fans who can skew a less popular award category by having a full slate requirement, but you still wouldn’t fix the name recognition factor — people who had to vote just to be able to vote on other categories would just pick names they recognized for categories they didn’t care about. Some of them do that now though they are encouraged not to do that. But it’s not against the rules.

            I cannot imagine any set of requirements for separating fan from pro that is going to get rid of a name recognition bias. And I can’t see Self-ID working unless you can change it from year to year, since again many “fan” writers and artists become pro ones over time. With Self-ID, you have a lot of incentive for essentially pro writers and artists who are doing a lot of self-publishing, unpaid work, etc. to declare themselves fan writers and artists to be in categories with less competition/attention. And the magazine situation would also be messy. There would be endless arguments over how some folk are self-iding themselves for the Hugos. Those are already happening because some well known creators accept their finalist fan category nominations when people think they shouldn’t.

            So a compromise of some sort is possible on requirements, but it’s never going to be fair or lacking the name recognition problem.

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      • I think that the mechanics of name recognition might be relevant. How much of it is simply recognising the name on the ballot and how much is due to the number of readers ?

        The former is obviously something we’d want to avoid but the latter seems inevitable. If more people read and like a thing more people will vote for it. If John Scalzi gets more readers because of his fame, and the readers like his work is it really a problem that the Hugo administrators should try and deal with?

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        • I think mainly for me that boils down too much to the Goodreads Award model or what the Dragons was supposed to be. Who has the most fans. Sure, there’s an element of that in Best Novel but the process works in a way that leads to fans of one book reading others.

          Liked by 1 person

  12. One huge issue I see here is that a lot of the proposed solutions would knock people like Alex Brown or Elsa Sjunneson off the ballot, because they got paid a bit of money for their work, while leaving pros like Seanan McGuire, Lee Moyer, John Scalzi, etc… because the work they were nominated and won for was unpaid. And this is definitely not something I want to see.

    Though just like Best Semiprozine, I don’t see a good way to resolve this issue right now.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Yup. The paid-unpaid distinction works badly in both directions. There’s paid fan work and unpaid work by pros. There’s no good rule that could be used around money as a metric.

      I really think self-id is the only solution to have distinctly fan categories.

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  13. Camestros has spread out a magnificent buffet of topics here, so of course in the trufannish tradition I’m just going to home in on a personal hobbyhorse. In professional sports there’s a truism that you can’t fire the players, so that’s why they fire the coach. In Hugo voting, you can’t fire the voters, which is why people who don’t like the outcome try to invent rules to stop the voters from doing what they want.

    But my gosh, how likely is that to ever work? Let me remind you about the most amazingly failed rules-fuck of that nature I know about.

    In 2011 an amendment to Best Fanzine was passed that was intended to limit eligibility to magazine-format publications (ie, no blogs). This was real inside, old guard fanpoliticking in action. And it really only passed because Andrew Trembley had rounded up the votes to get his new Best Fancast category passed, and for that to happen the Best Fanzine definition had to be changed anyway, so to that extent there was a common cause. However, in 2012 when the revised Best Fanzine rule came up for ratification at the Business Meeting, someone amended it with a phrase that gutted the intended outcome, and that’s what ended up passing, leaving blogs and whatever else eligible. My point being — even the reactionaries who dominate the Business Meeting had no interest in enacting such a gatekeeping measure, surprising as that may seem. Why? Because by now even they widely participate in fandom through social media or other digital communications media that isn’t in page format, and aren’t about to close the door on things they like and participate in being eligible for Best Fanzine.

    Time has moved on. Even the Business Meeting balks at rules proposals intended to recreate the Hugo voting culture of 30-50 years ago.

    Liked by 2 people

    • I remember the 2011 must-be-on-dead-tree attempt.

      Which was, ya know, about 20 years too late even then. A generation had already gone online, and even those of us who started back in dead-tree days thought it was stupid because we were living online and damn glad to ignore the typewriters, offset presses, collating, postage, etc. I was not quiet about my WTFery. (My first zine was run off by a used offset press a friend had, and was held together by roofing staples hammered in on an old scarred oak table)

      I really honestly think we could do without Editor, Long Form. Nobody knows who’s doing what at this point. Baen’s dead so he can’t whine about it any more, and his company’s stuff isn’t to Hugo voters’ taste, so the hell with it. The people who’ve been up for it lately are of course flattered, but I doubt anyone would be crushed if they never got nominated again.

      Just replace it with “Best Anthology” — of which there are many — which would automatically award the editors. Their name(s) right there on the cover, and we’d have a better chance of hitting something like a consensus.

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      • Lurkertype: I remember the 2011 must-be-on-dead-tree attempt.

        Then there was the 2013 attempt by a disgruntled fan who was pissed off that the Fan award winners and finalists were not what he thought they should be, to just nuke the Fan categories entirely. 🙄

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  15. Back in the day when Fan Hugo awards were first proposed, Buck Coulson–a mossyback fan who also wrote professionally–warned that this would cause nothing but trouble. He was right. Abolish all the categories! Let people who want that kind of recognition establish their own awards and find venues to present them.

    I was nominated for best fanwriter three times (’73, ’74, ’75) and continues writing for fanzines even after I began selling professionally.

    The initial switch from Best Magazine to Best Editor Hugo was pushed by Harlan Ellison, who may have hoped to win it for LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS.

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    • Come to think of it, I was a professional writer when I started writing fanfic for a friend’s Beauty and the Beast fanzine. Not that I was likely to win a Hugo, but I see y’all’s point

      Liked by 2 people

    • And you’ve done good work in both Fan and Pro categories, so there ya go.

      Lots of pros do good fannish work. Pohl won for his blog about the past days; I appeared in a fanzine along with Diane Duane who was already a pro before that came out.

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  16. To a certain extent, defining the difference between “pro” and “fan” seems to be a lot like trying to define the difference between “science fiction” and “fantasy”. Some things are clearly one or the other, but the border between them is fuzzy and indistinct. And just like the quixotic nature of trying to come up with a comprehensive definition for “science fiction” and “fantasy”, I think any effort to come up with an ironclad delineation between “fan” and “pro” is an effort doomed to fail.

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  17. Audio is actually one of the categories I think could do with attention. Not the best audiobook idea that was floated about, but just what goes into where.

    Escape Pod et al are semi-prozines. Presumably because they are substantially funded by patreon these days.
    Starship Sofa, while a mite past it’s best these days, is also supported by patreon and occasional advertising. Is it a semiprozine as well, or a fancast? I don’t know that I can answer that without seeing the accounts, which obviously I’m not going to.
    Levar Burton reads was fairly close to being a finalist in Related Work this year, which just seems odd.
    There have been purely audio things in Dramatic Presentation. I really can’t see why LBR would be RW rather than DP, but enough people nominated them to think there must be a logic I’m not seeing.
    Plainly these are all essentially the same thing. Person reads a story. Yet they’re scattered.

    Liked by 1 person

  18. After having spent way too much time mulling this over in my subconscious, I have a simple (and therefore obviously not right) possible overarching solution, that is likely to be unpopular with everyone. But ,it is elegant, in all its simpicity.

    Simply add a rule that a person cannot be a finalist in both a “fan” and “non-fan” category in the same year, and if that’s the way the nominations go, the person then needs to choose which one(s) they go for.

    This is obviously pretty unfair to any pro who is also fannishly active. But, it side-steps all attempts to divine intent and gives a smidgen of self-determination for the creator(s). Oh, yeah, also unfair to anyone who’s co-doing a fannish thing with a pro.

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