Whew! There’s A Winner At Last!

And I do mean at last — for the first half of the votes, Boxers & Saints and Eleanor & Park were running neck and neck. But the final surge pulled one ahead conclusively, so we can call it — and move on to honor votes, if anyone has time given that my Twitter feed indicates the whole world has already arrived in Philadelphia!

The numbers: We had 44 voters this time, which is five more than the first round, and not all of them were repeat voters. We’d like to run some numbers analyzing voting shifts among the population that voted twice — but that will not be happening tonight.

All 44 voters voted for three books, and no one voted off list this time.

Two books received no votes at all — 17&Gone and The Golden Day. Both had been pretty close to the bottom in terms of points in the initial vote so this is not surprising — it’s bad strategy to keep throwing your voting weight behind something you know won’t be going the distance. Although that wasn’t a stratgey embraced by everyone — Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, Charm & Strange, and The Kingdom of Little Wounds received one vote apiece. It’s a testament to each of those books that they had one supporter so strong that no amount of lost causitis was going to stop that vote!

Past that, we had almost everything clustering on the hump of the bell curve and garnering 3-10% of the total points, with only Eleanor & Park and Boxers & Saints on the high end.

And now, I’m going to cut to the chase (although data nerds should read on!)

Boxers & Saints took the (fool’s) gold, with 76 points, 10-7-5.

Yay for Boxers & Saints! If the RealCommittee considers this one book, I daresay we might see some real gold in its near future, but we’ll have to wait for Monday to see.

Moving on…

Eleanor & Park maintained second place, not that that means anything since honor votes are tallied separately, with 50 points — 5-6-7. The next highest grossing book was Winger, with 40 points (6-3-1), fairly close to Eleanor & Park — and a big shift from its showing in the first round, and on trend with the generally smaller spread between titles in the runoff. Notably, Winger actually has more first place votes that Eleanor & Park, but significantly fewer voters overall (10 to E&P’s 18), proving once again that consensus does play an important role.

The pie chart below shows percent of points, so you can see the overall picture.

I think we’ll leave it there for now, although we might run some follow-up analysis in the morning, unless we decide we need to focus on our day jobs instead!

As soon as I post this, I’ll also turn around and post the honor poll, so stay tuned!

The Pyrite Printz, or Pyrite, is the Someday My Printz Will Come mock Printz deliberation, and should not in any way be confused with YALSA’s Michael L. Printz Award, often referred to here as the RealPrintz or Printz. Our predictions, conversations, and speculation about potential RealPrintz contenders and winners reflect only our own best guesses and are not affiliated with YALSA or the RealPrintz committee. You probably figured that out on your own, but we like to make it clear!

Filed under: Process, Pyrite