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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 1725027" data-attributes="member: 177">Well, why do they submit the product without the fee? Because they want recognition and/or the potential sales boost.  Perhaps someone should go ask the publishers who submitted this year if they would continue to submit if there was a fee, or how large a fee they'd be willing to pay.  This is a question that can be answered by sending out a few e-mails, so there's no need to sit around speculating.In theory, perhaps.  In practice, how many companies have done so?The problem is that popular-vote nomination has an even worse problem - it is strongly biased against small publishers.  I cannot nominate a product I have not seen.  The panel of judges is guaranteed to have at least seen all of the entries, and has at least a chance to treat small presses fairly.  Popular-vote does not.  One annoyingly inconvenient partial solution to the problems you mentioned is to not reveal who the judges are before the submissions are due.Well, that problem goes beyond the panel of judges, and goes to the popular vote on the nominees, too.  And that problem cannot be removed.  No matter who is voting, a publisher may believe that the voting group is biased against them.I haven't read Mr. Cook's remarks (do you have a link?), but my first guess is that the problem isn't a strong one.  EN World picks it's judges (hopefully), based upon them being fair and reasonably capable of judging the quality of a work.  If the judge was percieved as having a strong bias against one publisher, he'd be less likely to be chosen as a judge.And, there's the fact that negative statements tend to get strongly printed on the human mind.  We remember people saying bad things more than we remember them saying good things.  How many individuals are actually responsible for such criticism?</blockquote>

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