General Awards Process
The Aurora Awards has three main phases which we go through every year: Eligibility, Nominations, and the Vote.
Eligibility
Eligibility period is when we gather all SF or Fantasy works that were done by Canadians or Landed Immigrants in the previous calendar year. To submit works you must either be a paid CSFFA member or have a non-voting account. Non-voting accounts are reserved for publishers, agents, and non-Canadians.
CSFFA asks for the assistance of publishers, agents, authors, readers, and general fans to submit works to our eligibility lists. We want to have the most accurate lists of works for our members to use when they nominate for the awards. Membership is open to all Canadians and Landed Immigrants. Membership is a nominal $10 per calendar year.
If you are a publisher, agent, or non-Canadian, you can request a non-voting account. These accounts are created on a case-by-case basis, but we do them as quickly as we get them. They exist only to add works to the eligibility lists and cannot be used to nominate or vote for the awards. We have kept our annual membership fee to a nominal $10, so it is not a burden for an individual to be a member. To cut down on spam, inappropriate submissions, and brigading, we do not have an open publicly accessible submission form.
Each eligibility list submission is tracked, checked for validity, and confirmed by a group of volunteers and the Award Administrator before being approved. Once approved these works will in the dropdown display on our nomination forms.
Eligibility rules can be found here.
Award category descriptions can be found here.
Nominations
Nominations is the second phase of the Aurora Awards process. Works from the eligibility lists are nominated by CSFFA members for the Aurora Awards ballot. The top five works in each category with the most nominations will be placed on the ballot. In the event of a tie for last place, all works who are tied will be added to the ballot. This means that in some cases, the voting ballot will have more than five options for a category.
In addition to appearing on the Aurora Awards ballot, once Nominations closes and the nominated works are determined, the Awards team reaches out to the authors and publishers of those works and requests permission to include them in the voter package downloads so that CSFFA members who have not read the works can become familiar with them before voting in the award.
Nominations and Eligibility have some overlap, with Nominations opening after the Eligibility lists are open, and the Eligibility lists closing before Nominations closes. This is to ensure that people have sufficient time to submit eligible works as well as providing the Award Administrator enough time to verify them so that they can be nominated.
While we do allow non-members to submit to the eligibility lists, only current members of CSFFA can nominate works for the Aurora Awards.
The Vote
Once the top five works in each category have been nominated, the Award ballot is created. The voter package download is compiled and then shortly after it is released, voting will open. Members are able to download selections from the works under consideration so that they can inform their votes. More information on our voting process can be found here.
Only current members of CSFFA can vote in the Aurora Awards.