Want to see No Going Back win a Hugo?You can make that happen.

Yes, it's that time of year again, the week in which many SF writers, including yours truly, take to the InterWebs to push their works as award contenders.  I've joined the crowd for the last few years for a lot of reasons, chief among them the grief I took from friends when I didn't do this embarrassing bit of self-promotion.

Nominating a book (or any other work) for a Hugo is easy:  go to the WorldCon's Hugo nomination page, read the instructions there, and fill in either the paper or the online ballot.

Well, it's not that simple:  to do those things, you have to be at least a supporting member either of the current WorldCon, LoneStarCon 3, last year's WorldCon, or next year's WorldCon.  These memberships aren't cheap; a supporting one is sixty bucks, and an active membership, which you need to attend the con, will now set you back two hundred smackers.

For that sixty bucks, though, you get the progress reports and the right to nominate works for a Hugo for two years.

My only eligible work this year is my novel, No Going Back.  I think it's my best book yet, and I'd love to see it win, but I think it has far less chance of even being nominated than Billy Mack's "Christmas Is All Around Us" crass song did of being the bestseller of the Christmas season in the movie Love Actually.  The difference is that the song won in the movie, while I've never had a work on the Hugo ballot.

To place a book on the Hugo ballot requires a surprisingly small number of nominations:  most years, sixty or so will do the trick, and I believe a hundred would do it in any year. 

So, if a hundred or so of you would like to see No Going Back gracing this year's Hugo ballot, please get busy and nominate it.  I'd certainly be grateful. 

Tomorrow, I'll return to my regularly scheduled programming--at which I'll be less embarrassed than I am now.