We’re coming up on that time again, when the community of science fiction and fantasy fandom nominates books, stories, artists, etc for one of our genre’s highest honors: The Hugo Awards. To nominate and vote in the Hugo award process, you must have a supporting membership of the World Science Fiction convention for either the previous year, the current year, or the next year. For example, if you want to vote in this year’s Hugo Awards, you must have a supporting membership for World Con in 2014, 2015, or 2016. Hugo Award nominations are open until 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday March 10, 2015. You can see all the nomination details here.

If you have a supporting membership to any of these, I want to give you free eBook copies of two of my novellas: “Dead Weight: the Tombs” and “Dead Weight: Paladin.” Both are eligible in the novella category.

You should also check out my short story “Just Another Day in the Butterfly War” in the Bless Your Mechanical Heart anthology from Evil Girlfriend Media. Not only is my story eligible for a Hugo this year, the anthology itself is first-rate, and well worth owning.

If you do not have a supporting membership to World Con, you should, and here are some reasons why:

You get to vote in the Hugo awards. Few other literary awards take into account what readers of that literary genre feel is the best representation of the genre in any given year. First and foremost, the Hugo awards celebrate science fiction and fantasy by letting science fiction and fantasy fans nominate and choose the works we feel showcase the best and brightest work being produced in the genre.

The Hugo awards stay diverse. Something I’ve noticed in the last couple of years is that some authors, some of them with sizable fanbases, have begun to campaign heard for their fans to nominate and vote for them in the Hugo awards. This is not the same as those writers who let people know their work is eligible in any given year. In a recent year, one writer publicly stated that he was going to game the Hugo system to get a victory. Luckily he got a bunch of backlash from this announcement, and that had a negative effect on his campaign. The more people supporting WorldCon and the Hugos, the wider range of voices we have as a community to announce to the world the absolute best science fiction and fantasy have to offer.

FREE BOOKS! With the rise of eBook technology, in the last couple years, publishers have been offering free books of most nominees to supporting members of WorldCon. Last year, in addition to all other books, supporting members received the entirety of *The Wheel of Time* in their Hugo voting packet. That alone was easily double or triple the price of a supporting membership…and that’s not taking into account all the other works. So, yeah, FREE BOOKS.

Supporting WorldCon, a fan run and operated convention. Now, I love me a good Comic Con. I go to many during the year. I get a table and I make decent money selling my books there. The thing is, these are generally for-profit enterprises that have an air of commercialism hanging over the whole event. These have a noticeable divide between the pros and the fans. WorldCon, and regional/local science fiction conventions like it, are different. These are fans and pros getting together and celebrating a love of all things science fiction and fantasy. WorldCon is a gathering for all of us, and while a lot of business gets done at world con, and pros of all levels attend for networking and making contacts, we’re all in it because we’re fans. WorldCon is a labor of love by everyone involved, and even if you can’t attend WorldCon, it deserves the support of our community.

Did I mention the FREE BOOKS?

So, there you go. If you’re going to or supporting WorldCon, let me know, and I’ll send you a couple of novellas for your reading pleasure. If not, get a supporting membership, let me know, and I’ll send you a couple of novellas for your reading pleasure. (If you want to support an up-and-coming writer by purchasing the Dead Weight novellas, I won’t be offended.) Please though, only nominate my stuff if you truly think it’s among the best works you’ve read that were published last year. And that’s across the board, you should only nominate the works you feel were the absolute best of the best for 2014.

If you are interested, shoot an email to gallowglas [dot] army [at] mtoddgallowglas [dot] com.

And go to WorldCon!