Furry Writers' Guild Forum

Award Eligibility Posts

Publishing and Marketing
#1

I ran across the following blog post, “A short rant on Award Eligibility Posts,” and I thought it was worth linking to it here:

http://catherineldf.livejournal.com/364893.html

Also, this one:

The basic idea behind these blog posts is that while it may feel tacky (and some people may think it’s tacky) to post lists of your works that are eligible for awards, it can be an effective way to let people know about your work. Even if it doesn’t lead to awards or nominations, it’s still a way of letting people know what work you had published in the last year and helping that work find readers.

#2

I can understand it potentially feeling tacky from the author’s perspective. In an ideal world, writers wouldn’t have to make those posts, but as the first blog post points out, this isn’t an ideal world by a long shot. In the end, I feel the same way about eligibility posts as I do about things like Patreon and tip jars – if someone doesn’t want to contribute or a writer doesn’t want to do it, nobody’s obligated to do anything, from either side.

I admit, though, that to me there’s a difference between just “here’s my stuff that’s eligible this year” and leaving it at that, and “guys please please PLEASE go vote for me” and trying to get some kind of campaign going. One is information; the other does start to feel more like begging. But fortunately I don’t see authors doing that sort of thing very much, unless they’ve got some other agenda they’re trying to promote along with (or instead of) their fiction.