Nominations Date Change

Wow!  We went from having less than 20 nominations come in during the first week to a practical flood of nominations in the last 3 days.  Thank you to everyone who has (and still will!) nominate a book for this year's battle.

To make things a little easier on our Round 1 judges, I am changing the cut-off date for nominations to Tuesday, April 5th.  So if you haven't already, now is a good time to nominate your book(s) before they close.  Volunteer applications will still remain open until April 10th, as previously planned.  (And no, this is not a April Fool's joke, just in case you were wondering.)

So here's an updated timeline for how things will work:

Close of nominations: April 5th
Announcement of Longlist: April 7th
Round 1 Judging period: Present-April 30th
Announcement of Shortlist: May 3rd
Start of Round 2 Judging: May 8th
Announcement Posts for Round 2 brackets : Beginning May 22nd


And in case anyone needs a reminder of how things will proceed here's the process:

Nominations are submitted by blog reader via form.  Then each nomination is screened to make sure it meets all the requirements.  Once a book has passed, it is placed on the long list.

The longlist is provided to Round 1 judges, who will each read as many of the titles as they can in the reading period.  At the end of Round 1, the top 16 books as decided by Round 1 judges will compiled into the shortlist.

Shortlisted titles will be organized into brackets by pairs.  Round 2 judges will read both books in their assigned bracket, choose a winner between the two, and that book will move on to the next series of brackets until eventually one book will be declared the final winner.

And that's pretty much it!