Many of you will already have seen the press release put out by Renovation, this year’s Worldcon, yesterday. I was heading to bed when it appeared, but Petrea Mitchell kindly covered it on SF Awards Watch for me.

There are two key points here. The first is that we have another new record for participation in the nominations process. Last year Aussiecon 4 reached a new high with 864 nominating ballots submitted. Renovation easily passed that, collecting 1006 nominating ballots from people in 21 countries on 6 continents. That’s still a relatively small number of people, but I’m pleased with the strong upward trend.

The other key point is that the press release states that the nominee lists will be announced at 2:00pm Pacific Time (10:00pm UK time) on Sunday, April 24th. There will be simultaneous ceremonies at Norwescon and Eastercon, and apparently fans will be able to “follow the announcement live”.

What the press release doesn’t say is how and where this live announcement will happen. Mike Glyer has been speculating, and consequently I should note that no one has approached me about doing anything. I am also guessing that nothing has been said on the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee. There have been no official posts on their website, and Kevin hasn’t mentioned anything to me. In any case, most of the point of kicking me off the HAMC appears to have been to prevent things like this happening on the official website.

I am assuming that Renovation will be handling the webcast themselves. I have no idea how they are planning to do it. All I can say is that Kevin and I will be at the Eastercon event, and if no one else is providing coverage we will attempt to do so. If Renovation has something wonderful planned and I can sit back and enjoy the event I shall be very happy.