Hugo Gernsback
The Hugo Awards or "Hugos" are the annual achievement awards presented at the World Science Fiction Convention, selected in a process that ends with vote by current Convention members. They originated and acquired the "Hugo" nickname during the 1950s and were formally defined as a convention responsibility under the name "Science Fiction Achievement Awards" early in the 1960s. The nickname soon became almost universal and its use legally protected; "Hugo Award(s)" replaced the longer name in all official uses after the 1991 cycle.
Hugo Award
The official logo of the Hugo Awards is often placed on the winning books' cover as a promotional tool. Gahan Wilson, in "First World Fantasy Awards" (1977), claimed that noting that a book had won the Hugo Award on the cover "demonstrably" increased sales for that novel, though Orson Scott Card said in his 1990 book "How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy" that the award had a larger effect on foreign sales than in the United States. Spider Robinson, in 1992, claimed that publishers were very interested in authors that won a Hugo Award, more so than for other awards such as the Nebula Award. Literary agent Richard Curtis said in his 1996 "Mastering the Business of Writing" that having the term Hugo Award on the cover, even as a nominee, was a "powerful inducement" to science fiction fans to buy a novel, while Jo Walton claimed in 2011 that the Hugo is the only science fiction award "that actually affects sales of a book".