The above image is pretty much what the Horror Writers Association looks like as of this posting in late August, after a summer of self-inflicted wounds and horrendous publicity. But people still want Stokers for the time being, so I hope the following advice is helpful. I also hope the HWA gets its shit together.

In the past couple of years, I’ve been a Stoker Award juror. I don’t want to be specific about which categories I’ve judged, but let me tell you: It is hard. We got a lot of really good submissions. I’ve always had a very tough time narrowing down my top ten choices to submit to the chair. And I was never a judge in one of the busier categories; I shudder to think what judging something like Short Fiction must be like. 

There was always something I really liked that just missed the final list I submitted to our chair. Maybe I’d already listed a similar piece that I liked a little more. Or maybe I felt that the piece’s theme had already been explored quite a lot over the years, and my final choices focused on less well-tread topics. 

And some of my top ten pieces, the ones I thought were the best of what we got, didn’t make it to the list the jury chairperson submitted to the committee; in the final tally, more jurors preferred something else. That’s how it goes. That’s why there are multiple jurors for each category. If you’ve submitted something for a Stoker in the past and didn’t make the preliminary ballot, just know that these decisions are so difficult. It definitely doesn’t mean nobody liked your work.  

I don’t want to discourage anyone from submitting their work for a Stoker, because my taste is not everyone else’s taste. But if you’ve got something eligible and want to submit, here are a few general guidelines I think might help:

1. Look at the rules for the category. For example: If you’ve previously published a novel under any name in any genre, your work is no longer eligible for First Novel. Check your word count. And double-check your publication year. If your work is too long or too short for the category, or if it didn’t come out in the current award year, it’s not eligible. 

2. If your work was published between January 1 and November 30th of the award year, you’ve got to submit it to the jury no later than November 30th. Only work published in December can be submitted in December. A lot of people tend to wait until the last minute to submit as it is, and the Stoker committee is trying to help us not get buried under a ton of last-second submissions in late December, a busy holiday season for many people. I hated having to disqualify pieces that would have been perfectly suitable otherwise. 

3. Ask yourself: Is this piece you’re about to submit really horror? Really truly? So much so that it deserves to be thought of as a superior achievement in horror writing? This is subjective, of course, but we’d get the occasional submission that was well-written but had a very tenuous connection to anything horror. You can still submit it, of course. But it’s unlikely to make my top ten list.

4. If I start reading a submission and find multiple grammar/spelling issues in the first few pages, that’s an instant Nope. I might not be such a hardass if I were just reading for myself, but someone wanting a Stoker needs to step up their game. Sure, we’ve all had that maddening error that somehow made it through several passes by different editors into the finished product. But to me, a superior achievement means that any spelling, punctuation, or grammar errors had better be extremely few and very far between. 

5. I really can’t believe I have to say this, but given the recent pro-AI screed in the HWA newsletter, apparently I do: If you use AI at any point in your work’s development, including a book cover, you’re not getting a Stoker if I have anything to say about it. 

Finally, I strongly recommend that every HWA member try to serve on a jury—especially a fiction jury—at least once. You will have a new appreciation for what it must feel like to be an agent or an acquiring editor. Even though we don’t get hit with nearly as many submissions as these folks do, you start understanding what they go through when hunting through a slush pile. 

Have you read all of this and still want to submit? Here’s the Stoker Awards submissions page, with even more rules. Good luck!