One Step Over the Line…?

If I were a puppy, I would have already sent an email out to the 172 contributors to this website, strongly urging them to vote their own best interests and nominate Amazing Stories for the Best Semi-Prozine category this year.

I’d have urged them to vote for their fellow contributors as well in the appropriate categories.

I might have even thought of purchasing a membership for any of them who hadn’t already gotten one (not that I can afford it, but given sufficient motivation….)

I also might have sent out a general release email to the 1,163 subscribers (a special category of membership here) urging them to do the same and, if I’d gone that far, I almost certainly would have written to the 35,523 site Members registered here

If even 1 percent of that membership had taken me up on the suggestion, we’d certainly be on the final ballot, probably in several categories.  If our contributors and subscribers had all voted together (carefully filling out their ballots to avoid triggering “bloc voting”), we’ve be casting nearly HALF of the ballots that were cast in last year’s final vote.

Needless to say, if I found a way to motivate ALL of our membership, Worldcon would have a VERY hefty budget to pass along to subsequent conventions – to the tune of 1.4 Million in Supporting Membership fees.

I could have taken several different approaches to this:  I could have written to all of the high-profile individuals involved and urged them to start their own little campaigns (always with Amazing Stories in the mix) to avoid hints of collusion and vote fixing; I could have reminded authors and artists and editors what a “win” could do for their careers; I could have started an anonymous trolling campaign on social networks; I could have offered payola….

But of course we do none of these things, because it just isn’t right.

I urge all of our members, subscribers and contributors to participate in the Worldcon and the Hugo Awards and, when doing so, to vote for what they are familiar with and to vote only for those works and individuals who they believe are truly “Hugo Worthy”.