If we’d known ahead of time that so many people would love Machine of Death as much as we do, we probably would have done a few things differently. For instance, we might have thought a little more carefully about our release date. The total of all the thinking that went into picking October 26 can be summed up thusly: “Hey, the book is finished! When should we publish it? How about Tuesday? Okay!”

But we’ve since learned that if you publish a book at the very end of October and if you don’t provide advance copies to anybody, it means you will probably be too late to be considered for anybody’s “best of the year” list. (We only qualified for Amazon’s top ten customer favorite list by a scant five days!) It also means that people won’t necessarily have time to read your book before they have to nominate stories for many of the year’s awards.

Well, luckily there are at least a few awards still taking nominations, and they’re some of the big ones!

The Nebulas: The Nebulas are selected by the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA). Most members are eligible to nominate stories in length-based categories through February 15, 2011. The top six vote-getters in each category will then proceed to the official ballot, which active members will vote on.

The Hugos: These are selected by the attendees of Science Fiction Worldcon. Nominations are open until March 26, 2011, but in order to have your nominations counted you will need to confirm your eligibility by January 31, 2011. Details on how you become eligible are here.

Unfortunately, neither the Nebulas nor the Hugos have an anthology category, so the book as a whole doesn’t really fit anywhere on their ballots. However, if you’re eligible to nominate or vote for either of these awards, we ask you to keep our writers in mind for the short story and novelette categories.

If you haven’t finished reading the book yet, we as editors would suggest you look at and consider “ALMOND” by John Chernega for the novelette category (over 7500 words) and “LOSS OF BLOOD” by Jeff Stautz for the short story category. A free PDF of the entire book (including both of these stories) is available for download here.