The Cybils Winners (and a small request for help)
February 14, 2009
The winners of the 2009 Children's and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Awards were announced this morning on the Cybils website. Head on over to the Cybils site to see if your favorite is a winner. I'm especially excited about the Easy Reader winner (since I was a judge in that category): I Love My New Toy, an Elephant and Piggie book by Mo Willems; the YA Fantasy winner: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (my review); and the Middle Grade Fiction winner: The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd (my review). ETA: And I was in such a rush to get this post up that I somehow missed that the title that I nominated for MG/YA nonfiction won: The Year We Disappeared by Cylin Busby and John Busby (my review). I obviously think well of that, since I nominated it.
If you are excited about the winners, too, and would like to show a bit of support for the Cybils, please consider clicking through from the links in the announcement post (or my links in this post) to purchase the winners from Amazon. This serves two purposes. First, the Cybils organization gets a small commission, with proceeds going towards buying a nice gift for the winners. Second, if you purchase from Amazon in the next few days, this will help the winners' Amazon rankings to improve. We'll be tracking these ranking numbers, and we would LOVE to be able to tell the publishers and authors that the Cybils award made a tangible difference (as has been the case in previous years). Although we're happy to see the books purchased from other sources, too, of course, we've found that the Amazon rankings offer a relatively easy way for us to quantify our impact.
In the bigger picture, of course, we just want to see these winning books (and really, all of the short list titles) read and appreciated, whether you buy them from an independent bookseller (always a good thing), or from Amazon, or get them from your local library. These are wonderful books, well-written and kid-friendly - the books that our judges think are the best of the best. And with nine categories, there really is something for everyone. So, without further ado, I present: the Cybils winners! Happy Valentine's Day!