The Hugo and Nebula Awards and Repeat Nominees, Part 6

Almost done with this report, I swear. In the comments, it was suggested that it would be a good idea to look at nomination %. This’ll give a great piece of context for the “repeat nominees” charts: obviously someone who publishes a novel every year can get more nominations than someone who publishes a novel every 5 years. However, the author who publishes a novel every 5 years might have a higher nomination percentage than a more prolific author. I limited this study to the repeat nominees, those authors who had multiple nominations in the 2001-2014 time period.

So how does this shake out for the Hugo and Nebula Best Novel Awards, 2001-2014? The Hugo chart first:

Table 5: Nomination % for Repeat Hugo Nominees, Hugo Best Novel 2001-2014

***Gaiman turned down two nominations. I’ve included those in his percentage, because the voters did vote Gaiman into the slate.

What this chart shows is the author’s Nomination % (number of novels nominated divided by number of novels published) in the 2001-2014 period. I did make one caveat: I only counted novels published after the author’s first nomination. I figured that this first Best Novel nomination brought the author into the spotlight, and that their later novels received more attention and had a much better chance of being nominated. When an author had their initial nomination before the year 2000, I counted all the novels they published between 2001 and 2014. I pulled all this information off of sfadb.com and isfdb.org.

What does this chart show us? That individual authors have greatly different publishing habits, from the incredibly prolific Stross to rather unprolific Willis. There is some good information here: when Willis or Martin publish another novel, they’re very likely to be nominated again. Kim Stanley Robinson, on the other hand, doesn’t stand quite as good of a chance. This kind of information is very relevant when putting together a Hugo Watchlist.

It would be possible to get even deeper into this chart. Mieville, for instance, published two YA adult novels that are on the chart; YA novels don’t that well on the Hugos. Likewise, a bunch of Stross’s novels are urban fantasy, and urban fantasy books don’t do as well as science fiction in the Hugos. Any credible watchlist or prediction has to take all those complexities into consideration.

Table 6: Nomination % for Repeat Nebula Nominees, Nebula Best Novel 2001-2014

A similarly interesting chart. The Nebula repeaters have a slightly worse nomination %, which is in line with the Nebula not being as friendly towards repeat nominations. Once again, we can use this chart to improve any Nebula Watchlists that Chaos Horizon puts together.

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