Hey, all! It’s the time of year again when nominations have opened for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. To nominate for the Nebula Awards, you need to be a member of SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. To nominate for the Hugo Awards this year, you need to be a member of the 2015 World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane, Washington, or be a member of the 2016 Worldcon in Kansas City or have been a member of the 2014 Worldcon in London (some of you became London Worldcon members when The Wheel of Time was on the ballot last year).

It has become traditional in the field for writers like myself to provide a list of which works of theirs are eligible, so that people who are interested in nominating can look into them and give them consideration. As always, it is better to nominate a work because you love it in particular, rather than because of your general preference for a specific author. (Except in certain cases where the creator is instead the focus of the award, such as is the case with the Campbell Award.) The Hugo Awards have only the strength, and prestige, we give them. Please consider my works below, but nominate them only if you sincerely think they are among the best works you read last year.

That said, I do have a particular request this year. Although all of the stories in Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology are indeed eligible on their own in the fiction categories (and I’m certain each writer would love them to be considered on that merit), we at Writing Excuses (Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler, Dan Wells, and I) consider the main purpose of the anthology to be an aid to aspiring writers.

In past years, we’ve been nominated as a podcast for a Hugo Award in the Best Related Work category, and we won that award in 2013. This year, we would ask potential nominators to consider Shadows Beneath in this category instead of the podcast. We are very proud of the anthology, and think it does things that no writing textbook has before attempted. If you are eligible to nominate for the Hugo Awards, we will happily send you a copy for review. Please drop me an email through my website, and we will get one to you ASAP.

Now, on to the list:

Brandon Sanderson’s Award-Eligible Works for the 2014–2015 Season

Best Novel (Hugo or Nebula)

• Words of Radiance (Tor/Gollancz)

Best Novella (Hugo or Nebula)

• Sixth of the Dusk (From Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology)
• Legion: Skin Deep (Subterranean Press)

Best Related Work (Hugo Only)

• Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology (Dragonsteel Entertainment)
  (Note, if you are eligible to nominate, please feel free to request a review copy through my email contact form here.)

As an aside, if you don’t have at least a supporting membership for Worldcon, you should totally consider getting one (currently $40). With a supporting membership, you get voting rights on the Hugo Awards, and will be sent ebook copies of most (if not all) of the nominated books and stories (last year, the publisher of three of the novels decided not to include them in the packet). To nominate, you must have your membership by January 31st (or be a member of the 2014 or 2016 Worldcons by that date). To vote on the final ballot, you must be a member of the 2015 Worldcon only, by the voting deadline (sometime in July).

I’m going to be attending Worldcon this year in Spokane. I visited there for a different convention a few years back, and was impressed by how well the committee—many of whom are working on Worldcon this year—ran the convention. It should be a great time, and it’s one of the most chill ways I know of to hang out with authors. Worldcon is not like a comic con; there’s no frantic air of merchandising or enormous crowds. (Though I do enjoy comic cons.) Worldcon is about interacting with fellow fans and with writers. You can nominate and vote on the Hugo Awards with just a supporting membership, but to attend the convention requires an attending membership.

Hope to see many of you there!

Brandon

There are two new Writing Excuses episodes to talk about:

• Fan Writing, with Chris Garcia
• The Convention-Author Relationship, with Deirdre Saoirse Moen

Both episodes were recorded at Westercon/FantasyCon earlier this year in front of a live audience. Chris has worked in fanzines for years (and won a Hugo Award for Best Fanzine), and Deirdre runs conventions. Both have lots of great stuff to say, so check the episodes out.

The Writing Excuses anthology, Shadows Beneath, is still included in the NaNoWriMo Writing Tools Bundle of DRM-free writing advice ebooks, as well as through the standard ebook vendors that you can see above. We also still have some copies of the hardcover (with the ebook included).

Writing Excuses also announced last week that the September 2015 Out of Excuses Writing Workshop and Retreat will take place not in Chattanooga as in previous years, but on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, with many more participant slots available. If that sounds interesting to you, check out the description and the registration page.

Hey, all. Brandon here with a quick newsletter. I’ll be heading out to the Writing Excuses retreat very soon, and after that will be at New York Comic Con. But before I go, I wanted to mention a few books to keep your eyes out for. (And at the end, there’s a surprise for you, as thanks for being on the mailing list.)

Paperback of Steelheart is out!

First item of business is the Steelheart paperback, which launched this past week with brand-new cover art. I’m very excited about this book, and the sequel is coming out in January, so I hope you’ll give it a look if you haven’t already.

Here’s the blurb:

There are no heroes.

Every single person who manifested powers—we call them Epics—turned out to be evil.

Here, in the city once known as Chicago, an extraordinarily powerful Epic declared himself Emperor. Steelheart has the strength of ten men and can control the elements. It is said no bullet can harm him, no sword can split his skin, no explosion can burn him. He is invincible.

It has been ten years. We live our lives as best we can. Nobody fights back . . . nobody but the Reckoners. A shadowy group of ordinary humans who spend their lives studying powerful Epics, finding their weaknesses, then assassinating them.

My name is David Charleston. I’m not one of the Reckoners, but I intend to join them. I have something they need. Something precious, something incredible. Not an object, but an experience. I know his secret.

I’ve seen Steelheart bleed.

And here’s a link to sample chapters. Give the prologue a read if you’re curious. It stands pretty well on its own!

The Way of Kings is free in ebook in the US!

If you missed the news, The Way of Kings is free as part of a promotion on iBooks in the US for the launch of iOS 8. From now until the end of the year, you can download it completely free in iBooks on your iOS device or a Mac, or just using iTunes even on a Windows computer. And, not to be outdone, Amazon price-matched it for the Kindle in the US, though I’m not sure how long that will last. (Do note also that the book is DRM-free, so if you download it from either place, you should be able to read it on a variety of devices—or even your desktop computer.)

This is pretty awesome, so go grab a book before it goes back to regular price! And if you don’t mind sharing the link with your friends, I’d appreciate it. I figure with Book Three in the works (no release date yet, sorry), the more people who read the first, the better!

A Cosmere story, “Sixth of the Dusk,” in Shadows Beneath

If you follow my blog and social media feeds you heard about this a couple of months ago, but I’ve released an anthology with the Writing Excuses crew (Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells) called Shadows Beneath. It includes four pieces of short fiction, as well as:

• Transcripts of the original brainstorming sessions for each story, recorded on Writing Excuses. (You can listen to them here.)
• The first draft of every story, for comparison purposes to the final draft.
• Transcripts of workshopping sessions we did for each story. (These also ran as episodes of Writing Excuses here.)
• A special “visual changes” version of each story, where we compared the first draft with the last one and put a strikethrough on each word deleted and an underline on each word added. (This will allow you to directly see the editing process of each writer.)
• Plenty of other bonus features for each story, including essays on writing and the editing process, other drafts, and other surprises.

If you are a writer or know someone who wants to become one, or if you just love to see things behind the scenes, I can’t think of another resource like this one. In this anthology you can see the step-by-step process of four different writers and follow the journey from ideas to polished works. But even if you aren’t a writer, this collection has four amazing stories that are well worth the value. (And check out the cover by Julie Dillon, who won a Hugo Award this year for her artwork.)

My story in the anthology is a novella set in the Cosmere, the universe shared by Mistborn, the Stormlight Archive, Warbreaker, Elantris, and the novellas The Emperor’s Soul and “Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell.” This new novella, “Sixth of the Dusk,” takes place on a previously unseen planet where people use birds to grant them magical talents, and a solitary island trapper discovers a plot to destroy his way of life—and maybe his entire culture. This story does some things I’ve been playing around with for a while, so I hope you’ll check it out. You can read an excerpt here.

Legion: Skin Deep preorder

Final item of books-coming-out business is Legion: Skin Deep. This is my second novella in a sequence about Stephen Leeds, a man with a very strange brain. This is a bit of a departure for me, a contemporary thriller instead of a fantasy novel, but each story still has its fill of Sanderson craziness.

The first one is a few bucks for digital download, and the second one (which is twice as long) has a limited edition signed leatherbound hardcover for sale on the publisher’s website. It should be released in November, and there will also be a cheap ebook edition released about the same time. (And if you buy the hardcover directly from Subterranean, you get the ebook for free.)

For those wondering, yes, there will be a non-limited-edition version of the hardcover coming probably next year sometime, after the limited edition sells out. We’re not sure when that will be, but it will be coming. (And the first book will go back into print relatively soon, so stay away from the two-hundred-dollar copies on eBay.)

You can read an excerpt of the first book here, and the beginning of the second book is here.

Bonus for newsletter readers!

I want to start adding in little scenes of what I’m working on for mailing list members, as a thank you for letting me email you. So thanks! The following is a scene from Stormlight Three. Yes, it has big spoilers for Words of Radiance, so I suggest not continuing further until you’ve read that book!

Also, do be aware that the chapter is very rough, and hasn’t seen an editor’s eyes (or even had a second look-through by me). So it’s bound to have plenty of errors, and might transform dramatically before it’s in the finished book.

Still, I hope you enjoy it—and as always, thanks for reading!

Brandon

(The preview chapter was an exclusive for newsletter subscribers. Sign up here.)