David Gemmell Legend Award - Voting is Open

The first round of voting for the inaugural David Gemmell Legend Award has been open since December 26th and I've cast mine. I won't say which book I voted for (it is a secret ballot after all) but I will say that I think it's great that we have a new award that serves a dual purpose: commemorating the life and work of one of the great British fantasy writers whilst recognising the work of the current cream of the fantasy crop.

Of course, we already have the World Fantasy Awards, the British Fantasy Awards and numerous smaller, more specific accolades performing much the same latter role, so it will be interesting to see whether the DGLA works to differentiate itself in years to come.

Personally I think there's an argument for re-focusing the award on fantasy novels that are either published in the UK or written by UK-based authors. This stronger focus on the regional element would have two main benefits, from a marketing perspective:

1) It would generate attention for the work of UK-based authors and publishers, which would in turn offer a stronger incentive for those authors and publishers to support the award and publicise it via their own blogs, websites and mailing lists.

2) It would help to position the award as the fantasy equivalent of the highly-regarded Arthur C Clarke Award, which has been providing a focus on UK-based science fiction writers and publishers since 1987.

I also think a return to the originally-announced voting system - a judging panel for the final decision on the winner, based on a shortlist generated by public vote - would be a good idea. This original system had the dual advantage of allowing the public to have its say via the first stage vote, but then removing the 'popularity contest' element at the second stage and allowing a qualitative final decision to be made by a panel of acknowledged experts, whose necessary reading pile would be limited to just those five titles. A win-win there, surely?

But in the meantime, we do have a two-stage voting system, it is open to the public and I therefore urge everyone to head on over to gemmellaward.ning.com and participate. Voting is simple and you don't have to join the Ning group first if you don't want to.

Update 03.01.09: SFAwardsWatch.com picked up on this post, but managed to interpret my musing on how the award's marketing potential could be boosted as a call for a radical overhaul of the DGLA before the first winner has even been voted for. Hmmm. I'm pretty sure that wasn't what I was suggesting, but that just goes to show: it's all in the interpretation.

Update 08.01.09: James Long shares some thoughts on the second round public vote over at speculativehorizons.blogspot.com.