October Nomination Results: a mapmaker’s apprentice, the Romanian revolution, and human evolution lead the way

32 people participated in our nomination process for October, each naming their top three Newbery contenders so far. Some highlights:

• A total of 43 titles are on the list.
• No title received as many as ten nominations. THE LAST MAPMAKER leads the way with nine.
• 23 books received a single nomination. For comparison, only 15 received a single nomination last year, with roughly the same number of voters.
• One book that hadn’t received any suggestions (SWIM TEAM) jumped up the list with five nominations.
• The general sense I get from these results is that there are no real clear favorites so far, at least among Heavy Medal readers. Who knows what the real committee is thinking…?

The difference between “suggestions” (which we did from March – September) and “nominations” is important. Suggestions are the books that people feel are worth reading and thinking about, even if they might not be the best of the best. Just for fun, I divided number of nominations by number of suggestions to get a percentage for the top 10 suggested titles.

From this, I’m assuming that titles with lower percentages are ones that readers appreciated, but felt they weren’t strong enough compared to others, or maybe had flaws that would prevent them from contending. Another possibility: people assumed that others would nominate those titles, since the books had done so well in the suggestion rounds. So we may see people swing back around and nominate these more in November or December. In other words…it really doesn’t tell us anything…I just think it’s fun to play around with this stuff.

Here’s the full list of Heavy Medal Mock Newbery nominations for October. We’ll open up November nominations on October 1st.: