After much consideration the Cóyotl Awards Chair and the FWG President have agreed to make the two following minor changes to the Cóyotl Awards categories:
The dividing line between short stories and novellas has been moved from 10,000 words to 20,000 words.
Anthologies are no longer required to contain works by three different authors. This will remove the confusion about how to categorize single-author short story collections.
You can find the complete rules here.
I don’t see what the confusion over single-author short story collections is about. The traditional definition is that single-author multiple-story books are collections; multiple-author story books, usually with an editor, are anthologies. For the Cótotls, make both eligible in the same category, without any redefining of what collections or anthologies mean.
Before this change, the definition of the anthology category included the requirement that works by three or more different authors were included. That clause has been removed.
This is not about the definitions of the words “anthology” and “collection” (which are arguable and can be defended in different ways). It is about including single author collections in the Coyotls and fitting them into the category that they best fit into.
By the definitions of anthologies and collections as I understand them, the Cóyotl Awards now seem to have a category for anthologies but none for collections. If you want both to be eligible, I’d recommend changing the “Anthologies” category to “Anthologies and Collections” rather than creating a separate category for collections, or implying that single-author collections are a form of anthologies.
Single author short story collections are relatively rare – too rare to require their own category. Before this change, they were prohibited from being folded into the anthology category and would have had to be folded into the novel/novella categories or excluded entirely. This change allows them to be folded into the anthology category.
I am probably overly influenced by all of the single-author short-story collections by s-f authors that I read from the time that I was ten years old for the next forty or fifty years: Fredric Brown, Robert Sheckley, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, Stanley Weinbaum, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Henry Kuttner, Anthony Boucher, Frederik Pohl, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, … You’re right; hardly any furry authors besides Mary Lowd or Phil Geusz have had enough short fiction published to have any collections of them; and they ought to be eligible for Cóyotl Awards in some category.
There are a few others with single author collections – off the top of my head, Renee Carter Hall’s Huntress and Watts Martin’s Why Coyotes Howl. Even so, it’s not a big group.
Is there a way to add “Furries Among Us,” an anthology of essays by different furries (including Kyell Gold and Fred Patten) to the nominations/recommendations?
Official nominations haven’t begun as of yet. There’s a thread that we are listing eligible works in, though. http://www.anthroaquatic.com/forum/index.php?topic=814.0
There isn’t a non-fiction category at present.
Should there be? It’s a pretty small field.
Yeah, I was looking over the categories, and I don’t think the work would actually fit anywhere.
Non-fiction doesn’t count towards the requirements for joining the guild; it’s not what the guild specializes in.