In the example you give, we don’t eliminate the entire ballot of those people who placed Blackout/All Clear first; we just count their ballots as if that preference wasn’t there. So in this case, sixty voters who voted Blackout/All Clear as their first choice placed Feed as their second, so when we start the count for second place, we look at those ballots and say, “Their first choice isn’t on the ballot anymore — it placed first — so transfer their votes to Feed.”

The question you raise has thus far been left to the discretion of the individual Hugo Award Administrators, and there is, as far as I’m aware, insufficient precedent to give you an unequivocal answer. I suspect that if you ask the current Administrator a hypothetical question, you’ll be told, “We won’t rule on hypothetical questions; we only make a ruling when we’re forced to do so by nominee that would have enough nominations to make the final ballot.”

had an average press run of at least one thousand (1000) copies per issue

Does “press” mean physical copies (not just the colloquial “printing press” but digital printing, etc. of course) or does it also apply to “or the equivalent in other media” type of wording, which would mean to include digital file downloads? For example a “print run” of about 500 per issue, combined with 500 PDF downloads, making the total “physical plus virtual” run creep, just, above 1000.

I publish a print magazine, and do my best, and pay $0.05/word. There is no “profit from it” step. I will repeat: There is no “profit from it” step. You are welcome to put the many hundreds of hours and the thousands of dollars into a magazine to qualify it as eligible for the semiprozine award. You are quite welcome, indeed. And if you can come close to breaking even, let alone “profit from it”, I shall hail you as a genius.

Also, you spelled “cite” incorrectly. (And I’m sure my own post has its own errors, but I am not here throwing stones.)

The rules for Best Semiprozine, like all of the other categories, are in the WSFS Constitution. Any member of the current Worldcon can propose changes to the rules, including the elimination of a category, by submitting that change to the WSFS Business Meeting. (See Changing the Rules for details.) Every attending member of the current Worldcon can attend the Business Meeting and vote on all of the proposals. If you think there should not be a Best Semiprozine category, you should attend the next Worldcon, submit a proposal to the Business Meeting to remove the category, and attempt to convince the attendees to vote for your proposal. There is no Board of Directors or “Hugo Committee” that decides what the categories should be. The members of WSFS decide what the categories should be.

The members of WSFS also decide what publications they consider worthy of nomination or selection for a Hugo Award, since nominations and voting are open to all of the members. (See I Want to Vote for more details. There is no “Hugo Committee” who decides the relative worth of nominees. The Hugo Administration Subcommittee (selected by each individual Worldcon, not by those of us running the Hugo Awards Web Site) handles the mechanical administration of the Awards, issuing ballots, counting nominations, determining technical eligibility, and so forth. The Committee does not make value judgments about the “worth” of a nominee. That’s up to the individual members of the Worldcon to do when they cast their ballots.

I hope this clarifies how the Hugo Awards work and how you can make changes if you perceive that something needs to be corrected.

Sorry for the generic salutation, but I didn’t know to whom I should address this correspondence. I would like to lodge a formal complaint about the issuing of a semipro Hugo. I’ve read the requirements for qualifying for the award and they are as generic as my greeting.

It would seem to me that these, so called, semipro zines, are nothing more than a literary Ponzi scheme; whereby the magazines solicit stories from their readership, ask for money (donations) and then publish what they deem as the best story. They take the proceeds and publish a print magazine, which they sell to their readership and to the public, keeping the profits. We should all own a magazine that pays the artist a miserly .03 cents a word, and take their labors and profit from it!

A careful reading of any of these zines will show a multitude of grammatical and punctuation errors because the owners/editors haven’t a clue as to what the editing process is about. It’s not semipro, it’s semi-amateurish and brings the level of discourse about legitimate SF literature down.

I can site you chapter and verse, taken from various zines, including your last two Hugo semipro winners. The mistakes are fundamental to good grammar and have increased exponentially over the past months. Perhaps it is best to cite at least one example:

“Not people, for all that most of them had adopted the forms of people in homage.”

It is a non sequitur. The same story had four misspelled words. I’m not going to give the name of the story or the name of the zine; after all, I’m not trying to embarrass, but to point out a growing problem. But this is the type of grammar being published with your implicit blessing.

If the Hugo’s are giving awards for this type of poorly written and poorly edited semipro magazines, the mind only reels at what might be found a SF novel sanctioned by the Hugo committee. It would seem that if your organization is rewarding these kinds of poorly edited zines that it is also your organization’s responsibility to clean things up. It doesn’t take much effort because the trespasses are everywhere. All you need do is double click any browser with a link to a semipro zine.

Happy New Year!

I hope you will work to correct these zines, or disassociate yourselves from these ‘rackets’ that call themselves literature.

Best-
Mike

The complete list of winners, arranged by year, is on the Hugo Award History page.