WSFA Small Press Award Committee accepting nominations for works published in 2009
The Washington Science Fiction Association [http://www.wsfa.org] has created of a literary award to honor the work done by small presses in promoting and preserving science fiction. The WSFA Small Press Award will be given yearly for original short fiction works (17,500 words or fewer) of imaginative literature (e.g., science fiction, fantasy, horror, speculative fiction or like literature) published by a small press.
For the purposes of the award, a small press is defined as a hard copy print or web publication house releasing from 3 to 25 titles per year. Eligible periodicals are those with a paid circulation of fewer than 10,000 in the year that the story is published. Periodicals must have an must pay authors in cash as opposed to non-monetary items. Any story published in a periodical owned by a major publishing house or media producer is not eligible for this award. For complete rules check the website.
For this our 4th Annual WSFA Award, eligible works are those published for the first time in English in 2009. To help us identify worthy pieces, we are asking for small press publishers and authors to nominate stories. (The story does not have to be published by you, although we generally expect you to nominate works from your publications.) You may nominate up to three (3) stories as a publisher, one (1) story as an author.
FOR THIS YEAR THE DEADLINE FOR NOMINATIONS IS April 1st.
Nominated stories _must_ be submitted in electronic form, in any of the common formats (e.g. doc, rtf, pdf). Judging will be blind, that is the name of the author and publisher will be stripped from the story. Therefore, we ask that you either send the story in a format that allows us to edit the file to remove the author’s name, or strip the name yourself but be sure to include the name of the author in the accompanying email message. Nominations should be sent to admin at wsfasmallpress dot org. The accompanying email should indicate the name of the person or entity that holds the copyright to the story and permission from that person or entity to circulate the story within WSFA for the purposes of judging. We also need to know the publication information (Publication name, issue date) The story WILL NOT be circulated beyond WSFA members and will be housed on a secure, password-protected website.
The award will be presented at the annual WSFA convention, Capclave, held each year in October in the Washington, DC, area. The award winner and the publisher will be notified prior to the convention.
Additional information about the award can be found at the website.