I’m a little late to the party, but Linda Nagata kindly rebutted my original post on the logistical issues of literary awards as a rationale for the rejection of self-published books from the consideration lists.  Here, I’d like to respond to some of her arguments. First, I’ll say that I don’t disagree with most of what Nagata has to say.  As an author who has traveled in both publishing camps, she of course understands the issue on a different level, and thus has valid points to make about the value of literary awards to SPed authors, etc.  My main point of contention surrounds this quote: The way I see it, there are two main purposes to a literary award: (1) to bring attention to specific books and authors, and by so doing (2) to shape the genre. Whether (1) & (2) come to pass or not, neither purpose is harmed or diminished by consideration of a self-published work. This may be an issue of wording, but I don’t consider these two components as the purposes of literary awards.  While the “shaping the genre” is certainly an effect of an award, to some extent, it is also a somewhat ambitious concept to apply to an extremely focused practice, particularly since “shaping,” as I see it, is organic rather than artificial.  We shape the genre by our reading choices and what we talk about as a community, not by recognizing works as “good” by a set of disparate, cross-purpose standards — as all awards invariably are.  Awards certainly cross over with the trend-setters and shaping works, but I find it hard to imagine the genre shaped purposefully by awards as opposed to by side effect.  This is particularly true of populist awards, which certainly suggest some potential for shaping, but which themselves are fickle, shifting, and disparate in form.  What the public likes one year will not match what they like the next, and in the long course of time, what they liked in 1987 may have been forgotten in 2007.  Curated awards suffer from a separate issue, which I’d simply call the limits of critical focus.  (This is a somewhat truncated explanation, so I hope the reader will forgive me here.) The first of Nagata’s points is, of course, related.  For me, awards are not there to bring attention to works, but rather to recognize works that fit within a certain paradigm based on that paradigm’s criteria.  This is where the wording comes in, as I see something different between “recognizing” and “bring attention to.”  The first denotes the idea that this work deserves attention because it meets certain criteria, while the second seems to have a more directed shaping effect — i.e., here’s a work you should talk about.  Recognition, however, is about achievement.  In curated awards, it’s an acknowledgement that your work successfully fulfilled the award’s criteria, and is thus noteworthy.  In populist awards, it’s the public’s acknowledgement of the same, but with less stringent and often impossibly variable standards. I suspect Nagata and I don’t actually disagree here, though.  Basically, I see the literary award as contingent upon its established criteria, however nebulous, and the process of applying that criteria necessarily specifies texts and author.  For example, the Nebulas only recognize science fiction and fantasy works from authors who are members of the SFWA; from there, the awards themselves only recognize what that small community determines is “the best,” which itself isn’t a hard set criteria we can accurately describe, since it is entirely subjective.  As such, narrowing by publication method is just another set of arbitrary criteria. The other thing I should mention here concerns the idea that the awards we have in our community are naturally open to SPed works.  While it is true that most (or all) of the awards are open to SPed works based on its given criteria for selection, there are few examples of such works appearing on lists from authors who themselves have not at one point, especially recently, had their work published traditionally.  This distinction may seem trivial, but I think it is important to recognize how our community applies validity to a given work.  In many respects, our community still does not look highly upon authors who have been published primarily on their own; it is far more forgiving when that author has a traditional publishing career either before or after the publication of an SPed work.  That’s something we’ll see change in the future — possibly when SFWA raises its pro payment rate for magazines to $0.25/word (ha) — but probably not after some form of mass culling or shift within self-publishing. On that last sentence, I’d like to expand something I’d said before on the nature of the SPed world.  Nagata doesn’t address at length my contention about the quality of SPed works (not that she needed to, mind), but she does say the following:  “[That SPed works are more commonly bad in comparison to TPed works] is still a common assumption, so credibility is extremely important for a writer who chooses to publish her own work.”  I concur that recognition via an award is certainly good for any author, particularly since, as Nagata discusses briefly in her post, awards can have a measurable impact on one’s career.  However, Nagata’s track record is one that is fairly unique in the SP world.  In comparison to the sea of SPers, most of them are not also traditionally published and award winners.  Nagata, as it turns out, has won awards in the past — the Locus for best first novel[2] (The Bohr Maker) and the Nebula for best novella (Goddesses)(woot) — and she has most certainly had a decent career as a traditionally published writer of short and long fiction, though of late she has been primarily of the other stripe.  I don’t bring this up to discount her argument, nor to poke mean fingers at her career or anything (a considerably one, actually), but rather to point out