Important Campbell quasi-info
Cheryl has posted a note about the new Campbell Award eligibility rules. Unfortunately, the new rules have not yet been published, and Hugo nominations close in less than a week. I don't know what that means in terms of who's eligible this year, but here are a couple of relevant excerpts from Cheryl's blog:
As I understand it, the new eligibility criteria will be very close to SFWA’s definition of a "professional" sale, but they will not be tied to what SFWA does, and they will be fully international (SFWA’s rules are, understandably, more focused on the USA)....
What does this mean for people making nominations for this year's Campbell? And indeed what does it mean for affected writers? Well, first of all as I understand it everyone is keen to do whatever they can to minimize disruption and unfairness. Again I can’t say exactly what Interaction's Hugo Administrators will do. ... But the intent is to phase this in as gently as possible. So my advice is that if you think someone might be eligible, nominate them.
Those of you who've already sent in nominations, I don't know if there's anything you can do at this point. But those who haven't, and who still plan to nominate before the deadline next Friday, the above should serve as a warning that Jim Van Pelt's excellent Campbell-Eligible Authors site may not be quite as comprehensive this year as it normally is.
My impression is that anyone who qualified under the old semi-formal "10,000-copy print run" rule will still qualify under the new rules, but I don't know that for sure; in the end, such decisions will be up to the Hugo administrators and the people at Dell who run the award. But again, as Cheryl noted, you should probably go ahead and nominate anyone you think might be eligible. (That's not official advice from on high; just agreeing with Cheryl that it seems like a good idea.)
. . . I just looked at Jim's 2003 and 2004 debut authors list; I think I hadn't quite noticed just how many SH authors became eligible under the 10K rule in the past couple years (not via their SH stories, of course). I'm counting eleven SH fiction authors, and a couple of other SH contributors as well. Cool beans.