Pyrite Nominations Are Open!

We are at roughly the 50% point for covering the contenda list*, and most of the year’s books are available to readers, so we’ve determined that the time has come (the walrus said) to launch our Pyrite Printz!

The Pyrite is intended to be fun, maybe even raucous, but it’s not just for fun.

Part of the RealCommittee’s process is culling the initial “list” (created through conversations and personal reading lists) down to a formal nomination list, and then, through in-depth discussion, further shrinking that nomination list to the shortlist.

We could just create a shortlist on our own. Certainly we all have a few books we think are the top contendas. But one of our major goals all along has been to make the RealCommittee process more transparent by emulating it as much as is possible via blog, so we need your nominations!

Nominations are open to all 2012 YA books, whether it’s a title we’ve already covered, an upcoming book from the contenda list, or one we haven’t even mentioned. Note: we are artificially limiting nominations to one per person for the time being, so think carefully about what you want to nominate and read through the list before nominating. This is not at all in line with the RealCommittee process, but we also have a lot more than 9 people likely to submit nominations.

A few other technical details: We might vote the list down at some point, much as the RealCommittee uses straw polling, with the goal of a tight list of 10 or so nominations to be revisited in early January (after all the contendas have been covered). We are hoping that everyone who chooses to go the distance with the Pyrite will read all the titles on the shortlist for those January discussions, which is part of why we wanted to get this going now. And then we’ll vote shortly before MidWinter, and see how our process compared to the RealCommittee’s. We will ask that you don’t vote unless you have read all of the shortlist titles, although we may also run an open vote, as we did last year, because it’s always interesting to see those results as well.

So (we say, finally getting to the good stuff) submit your nominations using the comments here!

*Click through for the original contenda list, organized by reason for contenda-ness. If you prefer organized lists, this version is alphabetical by author and subdivided by publishing date. The second version also is frequently updated with links as we write up books and is basically a table of contents for our 2012 posts.

In your comment/nomination, please include title, author, a 1-2 sentence annotation that generally describes the book, and a statement which references or draws on the official criteria to explain why the book you are nominating deserves to win the Printz. (This is effectively the same as the process required to nominate a book for the RealPrintz for both committee members and field nominators, although we’ve cut out the bibliographic data fields to make life easier.)

If you nominate a title we haven’t covered yet and would be willing to write far more than a paragraph or so in defense of that title, we are interested in running some guest posts, especially for those titles none of us strongly support. Just mention your interest in your nomination and we’ll be in touch.

(If we’ve already covered your nomination but you have a LOT more to say, we can run guest posts that counter or expand on what we’ve said in the January discussion period.)

Finally, please recognize that we are totally making this up as we go along, doing our best to find a way to create something that captures at least a little of the RealPrintz experience. This may or may not be exactly the right construction for the Pyrite, so let us know if you have any ideas on how we can improve this, especially as regards emulating RealCommittee experiences.

Filed under: Housekeeping, Process, Pyrite