We're warming up for the 2008 contest ...

The 3rd annual Cybils awards are nearly here!  For newcomers, Cybils stands for The Children’s and YA Bloggers’ Literary Awards, and we’re still the only book awards of any sort from the blogging community.

A refresher:

1. We open nominations to the public on Oct. 1 at cybils.com. Anyone 13 or older – authors and publishers included - may nominate a book in one of our eight genres.

2. This year, only books published in English between Jan. 1 and Oct. 15 are eligible.  This ups the odds of getting review copies in a timely fashion. 

(Authors – if your book comes out later than Oct. 15, you’ll be eligible next year. Promise).

3. Bilingual books are always welcome – there’s no rule on what the second language must be. Erdu’s as good as Spanish or Mandarin.

4. We’ll again have a one-book-per-category rule for nominations.

5. The books will go through two rounds of judging.  Finalists are announced Jan. 1.  Winners are announced Feb. 14. See tomorrow's post if you’d like to judge.

Hope this answers some basic questions about this year’s contest. 

Reminder: we'll post instructions tomorrow if you'd like to judge.

-Anne Levy, editor

Comments

[Anastasia]

Have you thought of adding a category for easy readers? When I posted the reviewer's list earlier this year I had several inquiries as to why we didn't recognize them.

I write easy readers - and teach writers how to write them as well - but I don't have any easy readers published during the dates posted, so I'd be happy to head this category if you decide you want to add it.

[Anne]

Hey Anastasia:

We've gone back and forth over this a LOT. It's probably the number 1 debate we have both behind the scenes and from our public post mortems. I think our feeling at the end of 2007 is that it wasn't quite a big enough category yet. The key word is "yet" of course.

You'd know better than myself, and I trust your expertise. If you think it could draw somewhere near as many nominations as poetry (currently our smallest category) I would say go for it. That's about 2 dozen or so--a low bar, really.

Let me know. I'd love to hear from other easy reader fans too. Do we need another category?

-Anne