Jim Hines tries to play the usual progressive card:
So what about Vox Day making the ballot for Best Novelette? My opinion of the man isn’t exactly a secret. If he got on the ballot for writing an awesome story, great. But unlike Correia, I’ve seen very few people trying to defend Day as a good author. He did post his novelette online for potential voters, so I downloaded it and started reading. I can honestly say that even if I knew nothing about the author as a person, I would have tossed this into the rejection pile after the first couple of pages.
And perhaps he truly would have. Every editor is entitled to his own opinion. But would he have been wise to do so? After all, nearly 30 publishers passed on Harry Potter. Hines is doing little more than striking a pose here that assumes he is a legitimate SF/F writer and I am not. (It’s a little amusing that he talks about a rejection pile when I am an editor and he is not.) In any case, perhaps we can consider the objective metrics available to the public and use them to compare two of my most recently published fantasy works to his two most recently published fantasy works:
(1) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #50,054 Paid in Kindle Store
4.4 out of 5 stars (60)
(2) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #148,509 Paid in Kindle Store
4.4 out of 5 stars (36)
(3) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #40,425 Paid in Kindle Store
4.2 out of 5 stars (142)
(4) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #101,358 Paid in Kindle Store
4.3 out of 5 stars (143)
One would assume that the more legitimate author would have higher ratings from the general public and sell more books, right? Two of these books were published by Jim Hines in 2013. Two of these books were published by me in December 2012 and 2013. Without checking Amazon, can you tell which two are my books and which two are McCreepy’s? And since his work was of sufficient quality to win the 2012 Hugo for Best Fan Writer, how can he possibly pretend, given the objective evidence, that my work is of insufficient quality to win the 2014 Hugo for Best Novelette?
(Cue the usual suspects and their fake reviews. Of late, a few Scalzi fans have been posing as long-time Kratman fans, then giving BIG BOYS DON’T CRY fake one-star reviews. Which, by the way, was published in 2014, has 4.3 out of 5 stars (61), and ranks #18,001 Paid in Kindle Store.)
As for seeing very few people trying to defend me as a good author, it is obvious that Hines neither reads the Amazon reviews for my books nor Making Light, despite having Abi Sutherland’s talking points down pat. I find it somewhat incredible to observe how the SF/F pinkshirts never cease their spin nor their attempts to control the narrative, no matter how often reality insists on surfacing to expose their pretensions.
ANSWER: VD (1) and (3), JH (2) and (4).