The Hugo Award and Publication Dates, Part 4: Conclusion and Discussion

Over the past several days, Chaos Horizon has been looking at the correlation between US publication dates and the frequency of being nominated for or winning a Hugo Award for Best Novel, 2001-2014. Today, we’ll wrap up that report and open the floor for discussion and questions. Here are the previous posts (with charts and data!): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Based on the previous posts, I believe the conclusion we can reach is simple: there is a definite “publication window” that extends from May to October. About 75% of Hugo nominees come from this window, as do 85% of the winners. May and September were the best Hugo-winning months, perhaps correlating to the start of the Summer and Christmas book-buying seasons.

Further questions:

1. How does this “window” correlate with the number of SFF books published per month? That’s not an easy statistic to find, although we can make a rough estimate based on Locus Magazines list of SFF books per month. I trust LocusMag—they’ve been making this list for a long time, so there methodology is likely consistent—but this estimate is gong to be very rough. We should only pay attention to the trends in this chart, not precise numbers:

This is what we might expect: there is a definite spike in books published right before the Christmas book-buying season, a drop off in December in January, and a slight spike during the Summer book-buying season. Since more books are published in May, September, and October, it should come as no surprise more Hugo nominations and winners come from that time period.

From a publisher’s perspective, it might be that the Summer season is being neglected—it looks like everyone wants to publish in September and October. If I were an author, I might prefer to published in May: there’s a softer market (fewer titles to compete with), and maybe more of a chance for publicity/to be read.

2. Are we looking at a self-fulfilling prophecy? Do publishers believe that May-October are the best months for publishing potential Hugo books? In other words, do publishers hold their Hugo books until this window, thus biasing the stats as a result? Would publishers be better off trying other months, in an attempt to break through to an audience that needs books to read?

3. Is the internet changing the importance of publication dates? If so, how? Do e-books provide more immediate access than print books, and would that alter the publication window? Could publishers extend the window by dropping e-book prices later in the year?

4. How much stock can we place in this study, given the relatively small amount of data: 68 nominees and 14 winners? Is this too small of a data set to draw reliable conclusions from?

5. Is it fair to only think about US publication dates? How would UK (or international) publication dates factor in?

Lastly, are there any concerns or issues you’d like to raise about this study? Statistics can be incredibly misleading, as they depend enormously both on the data set and the statistical model being set up by the analyst (in this case, me). Chaos Horizon is committed to transparency in all reports. How else could the study be set up? How could we provide a more complete picture of publication dates and the Hugo Award?

The Hugo Award and Publication Dates, Part 3: Methodology and Data

This methodology post is unlikely to be much of interest to the casual reader, but I’m recording this information in case anyone wants to double check the data, or to call into question the kind of data I used. It is very easy to mislead the public using statistics, and Chaos Horizon is trying to avoid that by providing maximum transparency on all studies and reports. If you have questions, ask in the comments or e-mail me at chaoshorizon42@gmail.com.

Date Range: Why 2001-2014? I used this date range because 2001 marks a substantial shift in the Hugo awards. Prior to 2001, the Hugo award for Best Novel was basically a SF award, with all prior awards having been Science Fiction novels. J.K. Rowling wins for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2001, and this opens up the Hugos to all sorts of different genres and types of books, and can be thought of as starting the “modern” era of the award. There is also undeniable convenience to starting studies with the new millennia. It’s also hard to believe that the book market back in something like 1994 was the same as now: no internet, no e-books, vastly different audience and buying habits. The farther we go back in time, the more we cloud the statistics.

September 2014 is when the study was made, thus marking the upper part of the date limit.

Limitations: I limited myself to US publication dates in this study, although the Hugo encompasses both the American, British, and international authors and voters. No novel in translation was nominated for the Hugo Award from 2001-2014, so the exclusion of international publication dates seems justified.

British publication dates were trickier, and I initially explored them in some detail. That data is present on the third page of the Excel spreadsheet. British dates were not as readily accessible, and even when I could find them I had no real way of double-checking them. Furthermore, some texts were published simultaneously in the UK; in the case of British authors, some texts were published earlier; and in the case of American authors, some texts were published later. Those discrepancies introduced a great deal of uncertainty into the project, as it wasn’t clear which date should be used. British publication dates likely greatly impacted the years the WorldCon was in the UK, and had less impact when the WorldCon was in the US. If anyone can think of a clever way to find and handle British publication dates, I’m all ears.

Sources: To find the publication dates, I utilized three main sources. First, I used the International Science Fiction database, found at www.isfdb.org, to come up with an initial publication date. Probably the most in-depth resource for finding information about different SFF book editions, I utilized the first available date for US print editions in this study, excluding limited availability special editions.

Second: I cross-checked that isfdb date with Amazon. While we can debate some of Amazon’s sale practices, there is no doubt about the wide variety of book-related information their site offers. Since they are a professional book-seller, they have a huge stake in providing accurate data. Again, I tried to find the earliest published print edition, and, whenever possible, to match the ISBN of that edition against the isfdb.org info.

Interestingly—and frustratingly—the isfdb.org and amazon.com information often disagreed. Of the 68 dates provided, there were discrepancies in 20 of them. However, these were often very minor: isfdb.org reporting a March publication date, and amazon.com reporting a late February date. In general, amazon.com usually reported earlier publication dates by a few weeks.

Third: If the isfdb.org date and the amazon.com date disagreed, I went to the Barnes and Noble website to resolve the issue. Like amazon.com, this provides a wealth of information, and I trust their database because that’s how they make their money. In almost all instances, the amazon.com date agreed with the bn.com, so I went with the amazon/bn publication date. All disagreements are marked in the Excel spreadsheet.

Any discrepancies were only a matter of weeks (pushing a book from June to July), and are unlikely to cause major changes in the analysis. Still, you might want to avoid placing too much stock in any individual month; I believe the ranges of the seasons are more reliable.

Other possible sources: I tried out several other possible sources for publication data before discarding them. Both WorldCat and the Library of Congress, two major sources for cataloging books, only provided publication month, and I wanted as precise as information as possible.

Notes: Four nominated texts were excluded from the study. Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s The Wheel of Time is a series of 14 novels published over decades. Connie Willis won for Blackout/All Clear, two novels published during the same year. I could have used both dates, but I decided to go with neither to keep the data clear. Two books, both from the 2005 Hugos held in Glasgow, did not receive American releases prior to their year of nomination; those were River of Gods by Ian McDonald and The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks.

Weakness of the Study: With only 68 pieces of data, we’re falling far short of a substantial data set. As a result, small changes in the data—an individual author publishing in October rather than September—may affect the final results unduly. Since each individual novel accounts for around 1.5% of the total data, take everything with a grain of salt. While I feel it likely the broader conclusions are accurate, the specifics of months, particularly for the winners, probably needs to be de-emphasized. We shouldn’t place all that much stock that Jo Walton published Among Others in January rather than February, for instance.

While I could expand the data back another decade, and likely pick up 50+ more dates, I’ve decided not to go that route. I feel that the publishing market in the 1990s was substantially different than the publishing market in the 2000s, and that this additional data would not contribute much to the study. If someone else feels otherwise, and would like to chart that data, feel free. Send me a link if you do the analysis.

Here’s a link to the Excel spreadsheet that gathers all the data: Hugo Dates Study.

I think that sums up methodology questions. Let me know if you need any other information.

The Hugo Award and Publication Dates, Part 2

In Part 1 of this Chaos Horizon report, we looked at the relationship between US publication dates and Hugo Best Novel nominations from 2001-2014. Now, we can turn our eyes to actually wining the Hugo Best Novel for that same date range. Here’s a breakdown of winners by month for 2001-2014:

A couple of notes: I didn’t include the 2011 Hugo winner, Connie Willis’s Black Out/All Clear, because it was published as two separate volumes, one in February and one in October. I felt that this dual publication was an exceptional case; including it would muddy the analysis. That still leaves us with 14 winners, because Paolo Bacigalupi and China Mieville tied in 2010 for The Windup Girl and The City & The City.

It appears that May and September are far and away the best months for Hugo winners, at least for the 2001-2014 time period. With only 14 winners, we shouldn’t put a huge amount of stock in this chart, but May and September make a certain amount of sense. May is the beginning of the summer book buying season, and September the beginning of the Fall/Christmas book buying season: having your book published early in those cycles might maximize exposure and sales. The more people know about your book, the better a chance to win.

So—going back to Part 1—even though May (10), June (9), July (9), and October (8) yielded the most nominations, only May yielded a good number of winners. In terms of ratio, September was by far the best, with 4 out of the 6 September nominees going on to win.

Let’s look at the amount of winners per season, 2001-2014:

Except for the dismal winter, that’s a pretty even bar graph. Summer does dip a little, but that’s an exaggerated due to the small number of winners (14). Essentially, I’d estimate a novel has roughly the same chance of winning from the Spring, Summer, or Fall.

The window is still in full effect, though. Almost all our winners come from that May-October period, 2001-2014:

The only two novels to win out of that time period were authors with already established reputations: Jo Walton for Among Others, published January 2011, and Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin, published in April 2005.

So, tl;dr: if I were publishing a novel and wanting to win the Hugo, I’d request a release date of either May or September.

Tomorrow, we’ve got the boring Part 3: Methodology and Data.

The Hugo Award and Publication Dates: A Chaos Horizon Report

As part of its continued statistical analysis of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Chaos Horizon is happy to present its first ever report. Today, we’ll be looking at the impact of publication date on the chances of being nominated for and winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Since this is going to be detailed, I’ll break the report down into four posts:

1. Analysis of publication date and the chances of being nominated for the Hugo, 2001-2014 (Monday 9/22)
2. Analysis of publication date and the chances of winning the Hugo, 2001-2014 (Tuesday 9/23)
3. Methodology (the boring part!) (Wednesday 9/24)
4. Conclusions and discussion (Thursday 9/25)

Introduction: The Hugo Award for Best Novel is a Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) award given annually at the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon). Voted on by the attendees of WorldCon, the Hugo has been awarded since 1953. For more details, see the Hugo awards website.

In general, all SFF books published in the previous year are eligible for the Hugo award. Nominations are due early the following year, often by March, and voting takes place at the actual WorldCon, usually in August, although the exact timeline can vary slightly. For this report, we’ll be considering initial US publication dates—the date a book is first released in print—and the chances of getting nominated for or winning the Hugo award.

Today’s research question is simple: are some publication dates better than others for Hugo nominations and/or wins? Some believe that January is too early to be published, as voters will forget about the novel when nomination season rolls around. Likewise, December may be too late, as readers won’t have enough time to read and process the book before nominations are due. Does a statistical analysis confirm these expectations?

Findings: When it comes to receiving a Hugo nomination, Chaos Horizon’s statistical analysis suggests that there is a “publication window” that extends from May to October. Let’s take a look at the data, which I generated by looking up the initial print US publication dates for 68 nominated novels between 2001 and 2014:

As you can see, there is a definite peak during the middle of the year. May (10 nominations), July (9 nominations), and June (9 nominations) were the best months, with October (8 nominations) also providing a solid option. November (2 nominations) and December (a sad 0 nominations) were the worst months. February was surprising, with 6 nominations, showing that all months—except December—have some promise.

When we break this down by season, the trend is even clearer.

We have a nice bell-shaped curve, with nominations peaking in the summer months and falling off on either side. I think the conclusion is pretty obvious: Summer is the best time to be published if you want a Hugo nom, with late Spring and early Fall being your other viable alternatives.

The window for maximum Hugo nomination chances extends from May to October, and the difference is pretty stark:

Nearly 75% of the nominees come from that May-October window, and only roughly 25% come from outside of it. While there may be other reasons to publish early in the year—a less competitive marketplace, for instance—when it comes to getting nominated for the Hugo, your best chances lie in publishing between May and October. Still, 28% is nothing to sneeze at. Life exists outside the “publication window,” and SFF readers are capable of finding good novels whenever they are published.

Tomorrow, we’ll consider what effect publication date has on winning the Hugo.

John Scalzi’s Lock In Review Round-Up

John Scalzi’s most recent book, a near-future science fiction thriller featuring a paralyzing world-wide epidemic and a detective plot, looks to be one of the best-selling SF novels of 2014. Scalzi, a broadly popular author—he has two television series in development, based on his Redishirts and Old Man’s War novels—is a strong Hugo contender with this book. I projected a nomination for him in my Too Early Hugo 2015 Prediction. He already has four Hugo nominations for Best Novel, including a win for Redshirts in 2012. Lock In seems a little more ambitious than his recent texts; it’s not a continuation of a series, like his Old Man’s War books, and Redshirts was more of a semi-humorous take on the Star Trek mythology.

The novel has also received a broad and impressive marketing push: Scalzi released an e-book prequel, and reviews and information about Lock In have been plastered all over the web. The book even has a theme song! High awareness + Scalzi’s Hugo history should equal another nomination. Interestingly, Scalzi’s novels have never done well in the Nebula awards, racking up exactly 0 Nebula nominations for Best Novel. He might be perceived as too “commercial” or “mainstream” for that more “literary” award, whatever all those words mean. While this might be a possibility for the Nebula, we’d need to see some glowing reviews to push it up in that category.

On to reviews:

Book published August 26, 2014.

About the Book:
John Scalzi’s web page
Scalzi blogging about Lock In reviews
More reviews from Scalzi’s web page
Amazon page
Goodreads page
Publisher’s page (MacMillian/Tor)
Tor.com page

Mainstream Reviews
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
NPR
A.V. Club

WordPress Blogger Reviews:
Ristea’s Reads (4 out of 5)
Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
Bibliotropic (5 out of 5)
Alison McCarty (9 out of 10)
As the Plot Things (9 out of 10)
The BiblioSanctum (4.5 out of 5)
Infinite Free Time
Lucy Moo’s Book Reviews
Books, Bones, & Buffy (4 out of 5)
For Winter Nights

As you can see, that’s already a lot of reviews, and they’ve been pretty uniformly positive, averaging out to a solid 4.5 out of 5. The number of reviews is a testament to Scalzi built-in fanbase; the high scores speak to the book being well-liked. If Lock In continues along this trajectory, it should have no problem snagging a Hugo nomination.

I’ll try to keep the post updated, particularly with WordPress reviews. If you have a review you’d like to me link, let me know in the comments.

Too Early 2015 Hugo Prediction: Additional Contenders

To go with my far Too Early 2015 Hugo Prediction, here are some additional possibilities for the 2015 award season. Some readers have noted that it’s too early to predict the Hugos: I 100% agree. That’s the fun of it. Why so serious?

Having this conversation early gives potential readers more of a chance to read the nominees. If anyone has suggestions for additional candidates, put them in the comments. It would be great if we, as a community, could come up with a comprehensive Hugo (and later Nebula) watch list.

As a reminder, here’s my too early slate (now in order of most likely to be nominated):
1. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Truth: Last year’s Hugo and Nebula winner, due out October 7th.
2. John Scalzi, Lock In: The 2013 Hugo winner, and one of the best reviewed and marketed novels of his career.
3. Larry Correia, Monster Hunter NemesisL who has offered himself up as a conservative alternative to the Hugo slate.
4. Andy Weir, The Martian: NYT bestselling hard SF novelist, that might or might not be eligible, as the book was originally indie published before being issued in hardcover this year.
5. Kameron Hurley, The Mirror Empire: one of the most buzzed about fantasy novelists of the year, and a fantasy alternative to the rest of the slate.

As always, my predictions are who is likely to be nominated, not who should be nominated.

Of course, some big novels will be published between now and the end of the year; Ancillary Justice wasn’t published until October, and it swept the awards.

First, let’s dig into the numbers. Here’s this year’s Hugo nominees and the number of votes they received, taken right from the Hugo website:

368 Ancillary Justice Ann Leckie 23.1%
218 The Ocean at the End of the Lane Neil Gaiman 13.7% * Declined nomination
184 Warbound Larry Correia 11.5%
160 The Wheel of Time Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson 10.0%
120 Neptune’s Brood Charles Stross 7.5%
98 Parasite Mira Grant 6.1%
96 The Shining Girls Lauren Beukes 6.0%
92 A Stranger in Olondria Sofia Samatar 5.8%
91 A Few Good Men Sarah A. Hoyt 5.7%
84 The Golem and the Djinni Helene Wecker 5.3%
81 The Republic of Thieves Scott Lynch 5.1%
74 Under a Graveyard Sky John Ringo 4.6%
70 London Falling Paul Cornell 4.4%
69 Abaddon’s Gate James S.A. Corey 4.3%
67 Steelheart Brandon Sanderson 4.2%
66 River of Stars Guy Gavriel Kay 4.1%

A couple quick things to note: Mira Grant wouldn’t have made it if Gaiman hadn’t declined, and she beat Samatar and Beukes by only a few votes. Correia was solidly in the field, one of the reasons I think he’ll make it this year, even if there is less enthusiasm for a “Sad Puppy” slate.

A fair number of authors on this list don’t have books coming out this year. I wasn’t able to find books by Samatar, Hoyt (Night Shifters is a collection of previously published novels), Wecker, Lynch, and Guy Gavriel Kay. Ringo has two zombie sequels out this year, which probably muddies the voting waters so much that he doesn’t have a chance. Cornell’s sequel to London Falling is The Severed Streets, but sequels tend not to jump up in the Hugo voting. Same thing for Cibola Burn, the latest Expanse novel by James S.A. Corey. It’ll be interesting to see if the Expanse TV series will eventually push up these novels, but that is still a ways off.

From last years close calls, that leaves Sanderson, who I dealt with in my last post, so that leaves Lauren Beukes:

Lauren Beukes, Broken Monsters (less likely to be nominated): Beukes almost broke through with The Shining Girls last year, a time-travelling serial killer story. If that doesn’t sound cool, what does? This novel is due out on September 16th, and has an intriguing jacket copy: a cop in Detroit, a mysterious case that seems to fuse human and animal bodies, and all sorts of trippy and disturbing stuff. It doesn’t, however, sound particularly like a SFF novel, but maybe more like a post-modern take on the cop novel. The description doesn’t really give away the genre, so we’ll have to wait and see how speculative this is. Even if it’s not a Hugo or Nebula contender, it still seems like a very interesting read. I’ve added it to my “to read’ pile, although I can’t pre-order due to Amazon’s feud with Hachette. :(.

Here are some other possibilities suggested by commentators:

Echopraxia, Peter Watts (50/50 chance to be nominated): This was a good suggestion of a potential contender. This is Watts’ long awaited follow up to the well-regarded Blindsight, which received a Hugo nomination in 2007. In those intervening years, I think Blindsight‘s reputation has only increased, winding up as one of the more talked about SF novels of the past 10 years. Watts has tons of challenging and interesting hard SF ideas in these novels, and I can easily imagine that element SF fandom coalescing around this novel. If Weir isn’t eligible, this could be the hard SF novel that sneaks into the slate.

Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem, translated from Chinese by Ken Liu (less likely to be nominated, but who knows): A real wild card. Cixin Liu, according to the Amazon.com description, is the most popular SF writer in China, and this is his first novel being translated into English. Historically, the Hugos have been completely biased against non-English language books. This is a shame, given that these awards are given by the WorldCon; you’d figured you’d have to honor the rest of the world at some point. This book is due out November 11th, and it’ll be interesting to see how much buzz it gets. I have it on my “to read” list, but it’s too early to say if this is an award contender.

Elizabeth Bear, The Eternal Sky series (less likely to be nominated): Although dead, Robert Jordan is still a trailblazer. By getting his entire series of The Wheel of Time nominated through something of a loophole (that allows serialized works to be nominated as one big work), this has opened the door to other fantasy series being nominated. Bear was brought up in the comments by Niall in the comments as a possibility. On the surface, this makes sense: Bear is well liked, has four Hugos (two for stories and two for podcasts), and this fantasy series is well regarded for its genre-bending. Still, Jordan didn’t make it into the slate that easily: he picked up only 10% of the total vote. How much less popular than Jordan is Bear? To nominate a series, voters have to know to nominate the series, and that takes an organized campaign and a huge fanbase. If Bear’s fanbase is 50% of what Jordan’s is (no offense, but that’s a wild overstatement of Bear’s popularity), she’d wind up outside of the slate. I find it hard to imagine any other complete series getting nominated, because no one beside Martin has Jordan’s huge following, and Martin’s novels already get nominated for the Hugo. Perhaps The Kingkiller Chronicles could be nominated as a series in a few years. Any other possibilities?

Fantasy Novelists: Take your pick of names: Joe Abercrombie. Patrick Rothfuss. Mark Lawrence. I’m sure I could add more. These are some of the most talked about fantasy writers of the past five years, and all have new books coming out this year. For whatever reason, though, authors like this don’t make the Hugo slate. Of those three, there are exactly 0 Hugo nominations between them. If anyone from this type of authors would have a chance, it would be Sanderson with Worlds of Radiance. I might end upgrading his chances to 50/50: if he just doubles his vote from Steelheart—a far less respected book—he’d be in the field.

I’ll continue mining the comments for more ideas, and I’ll try to address the other novels mentioned in the comments in my Hugo contenders post.