Time In Service

I have questions.  And so I seek answers.

During the Sad Puppies imbroglio of a few years ago, one accusation being tossed around is that new and inexperienced authors were being preferenced over older authors.  The suggestion was that the new hotness was pushing the old and busted to the curb.

I thought it was an interesting proposition.  The data doesn't seem to support it very well according to one measure.

The data languished on my hard drive for a couple of years until recently when Camestros Felaptron expressed the position that authors generally have a limited career span in which to attract the attention of groups giving out awards for writing excellence.

As I had the data through 2016, I tacked on the data through 2019 and did a little tweaking to the chart format.  And here we go.

The winning author for the "best novel" category is listed in order of the year of their win.  Mark Clifton and Frank Riley split the award as co-authors in 1955.  I used the Internet Speculative Fiction Database to determine the first year that each author published a novel as well as the first year that each author published a sub-novel length work.  

I checked all of those years from 1953 through 2016 in 2016.  I checked the winners from 2017 to 2019 today.  I suppose that something might have changed for the pre-2017 winners in the last three years.

The raw values for both series (novel to win and short story to win) are shown using the solid lines.  I created running averages on a 5 year and 10 year basis that are shown as dashed lines.

Anyone interested in the raw data is welcome to take a peek.

Here's the chart.

Hugo Best Novel Winners - Experience [click to embiggen]

So what does the data suggest?  For most of the history of the Hugo awards, the winner of the Best Novel category had to wait, on average, about 11.6 years on average after their first novel was published before winning their first Hugo Best Novel award.  Likewise, the authors had to wait an average of 18.2 years after publishing their first sub-novel length work before getting the Best Novel award.  

Those values have floated around a bit.  There was a period during the 1980s where nominators seemed to focus on significantly less experienced authors.  And the last 6-8 years have tended towards slightly less experienced authors.

The data doesn't support or undermine Camestros' assertion.  But it was that article that prompted me to update the data and finally push it out the door rhetorical and proverbial.