Bonus award recommendation that we didn't edit: "The Litany of Earth" by Ruthanna Emrys, a spectacularly good novelette acquired for Tor.com by Carl Engle-Laird.

Wow, you got to work with some cool books this year!

I'm curious what you do with the softcover books - I assume the writing and copyediting are done (unless it's a revised edition since the hardcover), and most of the typesetting is straightforward, so is it mostly a job of estimating print run sizes and selling it to the bookstores given the track record from hardcover and ebooks? Or are there other parts of the work?

There's much to praise there, but I give extra special mention to "What Makes This Book So Great", which has managed to become my go-to comfort read while still being perceptive and intelligent.

Reading it is like have a cup of tea with Jo Walton (speculation - we've never met) without the bother of having to fly to Canada and suffer horrible jetlag.

I really love that you folks do this. I wish more editors would.

Also, wow, you worked on some really cool books that came out this year.

This seems like a good time to ask a question I've had for a while: as a Hugo Awards voter without any experience in the publishing field, what should I look for when voting the editor categories?

Bill Stewart: I took it that Patrick simply meant books originally edited by him that had now appeared in softcover.

Darth Paradox: The Best Professional Editor Hugo was originally created to replace Best Professional Magazine, so as to allow editors of anthologies to be honoured as well. I take it, therefore, that in voting on this (now the Short Form award) one should simply look at the excellence of the product, for which, as a whole, the editor is to be seen as responsible. By analogy, I would think that in voting on the Long Form award one should just look for the editor with the best list.

That's a lot of editing (plus it is good to see that some good books are back in print).

Patrick: FYI, there is an attribution error in the OP, discovered while I was following links to the short stories on Tor.com:

"Where the Lost Things Are" is by Rudy Rucker & Terry Bisson (not Bruce Sterling)

Jeez, thanks, Bernard. Fixed.

I attribute the brain fart to the fact that (1) we've published two other stories that actually were by Rucker & Sterling and (2) I just recently acquired a third Rucker-Sterling collaboration.

In unrelated news, as you may or may not be aware, Rudy Rucker is a great-great-great grandson of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel...