Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist
The Hugo Awards are presented every year by the World Science Fiction Society for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine "Amazing Stories", and was once officially known as the Science Fiction Achievement Award. The award has been described as "a fine showcase for speculative fiction" and "the best known literary award for science fiction writing". The Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist is given each year for artists of works related to science fiction or fantasy which appeared in low- or non-paying publications such as semiprozines or fanzines. A Hugo Award for professional artists is also given. The fan award was first presented in 1967 and has been awarded annually. Beginning in 1996, Retrospective Hugo Awards, or "Retro Hugos", have been available to be awarded for years 50, 75, or 100 years prior in which no awards were given. To date, Retro Hugo awards have been awarded for 1939, 1941, 1943, 1946, 1951, and 1954, although only the 1946 and 1951 Retro Hugos received sufficient nominations for the Fan Artist Hugo to make the ballot.
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".