Hacker News Reader

Comment by BryantD | Hacker News Reader

Cost analysis:

The administrators identified 377 ballots and associated memberships as fraudulent. Assuming all fraudulent memberships were new, the minimum cost per voting membership is £45 [1]. Total cost assuming no additional undetected memberships: £16,965 or just under $22,000 at current exchange rates.

Unfortunately current discussions of the marketing value of a Hugo Award have been somewhat drowned out by those who think the fan value of a Hugo is not as high as it once was, but it's not an influential award; if it's true that a Hugo Award for Best Novel generates a thousand or so additional sales, it's hard to make the economics of buying a Hugo make sense.

[1] https://glasgow2024.org/for-members/memberships-and-tickets/, WSFS Membership.

View on HN

"I got a Hugo" is probably worth something in negotiations with traditional publishers; exactly which award is being stuffed is not mentioned. If you're up for, say, "Best Fan Writer" and are looking for a traditional publisher then it's starting to look attractive, if you can think of a clever way to cover the costs.

"Prove you voted for me and you get access to a big download of everything I made in the past decade, which would cost $300 to buy normally" comes to mind as a way to cover a chunk of that. Crowdfunding!

You’re right, it’s uneconomic to manipulate the vote this way. However, if recent history is anything to go by, the motivation here is political, not economic.

One would think so, but, having read all the fiction nominees this year, I can't think of any who would have an obvious political agenda to back them.

One possibility I could think of is a certain state trying to boost their up and coming Science Fiction industry, but even that seems a rather far fetched prospect.

You can stick "Hugo award winning author" on the cover of the next twenty crappy novels you write which might bring that total up a little.

> if it's true that a Hugo Award for Best Novel generates a thousand or so additional sales, it's hard to make the economics of buying a Hugo make sense.

$22,000 is cheap in the world of literature award purchasing.

Authors will often hire services to buy their books by the thousands to get on to best seller lists. The cost can be on the order of $100,000.

I know one author who had purchased many boxes of his own book with the intention of getting them back into his publisher's system somehow and recouping some money. Apparently he didn't plan it out fully, because not only did the book not sell well but he was stuck with boxes and boxes of his own book. He couldn't even give them away after a while.

Same goes for vinyl and music charts (downloads).

For a certain time some producers and their label magically went into the top 10 in their not so small niche. Ok-ish stuff, but very short lived.

What a beautiful marketing machine in a very expensive and taste driven industry. It seems to appear a great way to launder money.

In Germany there was also a small scandal around a singer who’s producer had to admit to vinyl buying practices as a side note in a court case.

How many future sales, speaking gigs, etc. does being a "Hugo-winning author" open up?

I expect very little of that makes much money.

That how I buy my sci fi books, so at least one. To be fair I usually buy all the nominees

I read a lot of SFF, but the actual Hugo / Nebula winners don't really move up in my reading list compared to the other nominees.

Maybe the "winner" sticker drives some paper book sales?

Some? Not a ton.

https://humanlegion.com/hugo-award-sales-figures/ has some data for one year. "They do have an effect, but probably no more than a few thousand sales for most books, maybe over ten thousand for the luckiest, and then only in exceptional years."

So maybe a dollar a book on the outside.

To offer a counter anecdote: for a while I enjoyed reading books from the list of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards[1] - and later from the list of winners for a single award (same, Hugo or Nebula).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_joint_winners_of_the_H...

Yeah, I've read a couple of more modern Hugo award winners and thought that they sucked. Maybe I just got unlucky, but it certainly didn't inspire confidence that I will enjoy reading the award recipients.

I think I've read a large proportion of recent Hugo winners, and they definitely tend to be better than average. The nominees are normally pretty good in general.

"Better than average" is a pretty low bar. I'd certainly hope that a winner of one of the more recognized SF awards would be somewhere on the upper end of the quality distribution whether or not it's a great indication for

You're expecting too much from a fan award. It's a popularity contest like the People's Choice awards.

Look at juried awards like the Clarke award if you want something that isn't just a popularity contest.

No Iain M Banks or Peter F Hamilton on the Hugo winners list which says everything to me

Exactly, it says that their publishers did a bad job of marketing in North America.

I think Banks possibly just had the poor planning to die to early, there. Both due to the nationality thing (it has gotten a _bit_ less American-centric), and because it feels like his _style_ fits better with current winners than 90s winners (I was actually quite surprised to discover than Ancillary Justice was _not_ in some way a Culture homage).

The statement doesn't say it's the Best Novel. Maybe there's someone who would happily drop a ton of money to be a Hugo-award-winning Professional Artist?

Or maybe Paramount are desperate to beat Doctor Who in Dramatic Presentation, Short Form?

Maybe more likely to get a lucrative movie deal?

Best payoff might be the Hugo Award for Best Series.

Maybe. In genre fiction generally, I find series can be pretty interminable even if I like them.

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) and this year's new Best Game or Interactive Work stand out to me as the categories most where the economics are weirdest. 22,000 pounds may be a rounding error to some film and game marketing budgets, they might not even need to do the math on how many extra sales they could get from the "Hugo Award Winning" sticker they can slap on the Blu-Rays or Steam tags.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com