Mar 19 2009
Let the DABWAHA Voting Begin
It’s time. The books have been nominated, seeded and slated against each other. Over 700 brackets were filled out. (That’s twice as many as last year). We’ve got some mad prizes: a Sony Reader for the one bracket that rules them all and a Sony Reader for the author who penned the Champion of the DABWAHA tournament.
This year, we are handing out prizes at the end of each round to the top scoring bracket. Each right pick gives you points. The goal, obviously, is to have the most right picks. Even though your brackets are locked and you can’t change your choices, you still can effectuate the outcome by getting people to vote for the book you want to advance.
Voting starts on March 19, 2009, at 6:00 AM EST. Each set of 4 polls will run for 6 hours. The set of polls will close and a new set will open recursively until March 21, 2009, at 6:00 AM EST when the last set of polls will close. Results will be updated at the end of the day.
You can keep track of who is up, who is down and how your bracket is shaping up against the competition by reading the “REPORTS” at the DABWAHA tournament site. You can see the actual standings and the projected standings (I have no idea how the computer program calculates this). You can see which books were picked as the Champion. Spymaster’s Lady was picked 93 times followed by Blue Eyed Devil (61), Tribute (58) and Dark Desires After Dusk (56).
Still interested in reading the books? Options, you can has them!
- Harlequin is so excited about their nominated books they’ve created a special store at eHarlequin to celebrate. Everything in that special store is 30% off with the coupon code ‘MADROMANCE’ – and you can click one button to add every book to your cart.
- BooksonBoard, the supplier of one of our SONY READER prizes, has also created a great webstore for the nominees.
- Plus, Fictionwise, another of our awesome sponsors, has created a special store with all the nominated titles which are available in ebook form.
- If you want paper copies, you can visit our Amazon.com store.
Big huge heaping thanks to our sponsors, Sony, Harlequin, Samhain Publishing, and Fictionwise, because they’ve enabled us to offer a prize for the winning bracket after each round of competition. For a complete list of the prizes, visit the DABWAHA.com site.
Good luck and let the trash talking begin.
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Mar 19, 2009 @ 04:30:56
Took me a while to figure it’s 6:30 Eastern Savings Time here :P I will check back in half an hour.
Congrats on so many entries. And I just want to say thanks for all of your hard work.
Mar 19, 2009 @ 05:09:49
There still aren’t any polls up. Am I doing it wrong? I will check back at 8. Thanks!
Mar 19, 2009 @ 05:45:10
I don’t see anywhere to vote either and it’s 7:45 EST.
Mar 19, 2009 @ 05:50:34
I, too, couldn’t find any polls. And google tells me it’s now 7:50 EST. Arggg.
Mar 19, 2009 @ 06:03:44
8:03, and still no polls. :-(
Mar 19, 2009 @ 06:20:07
The polls are up. There’s something wrong with the internal clock on the other blog but we’ll get it worked out.
Mar 19, 2009 @ 06:28:49
Bah. I just realized that the picks listed for me are completely not my picks! Too late to do anything about it now, I know. So, I suppose I’ll just have fun voting and watching the madness. :)
Mar 19, 2009 @ 06:31:14
Hi, I just wanted to let you know that when I try to reach the DA site via Firefox I get re-directed to http://www.quantcast.com/. With IE everything is all right. Not sure if it’s my computer or not, everything else works.
Mar 19, 2009 @ 06:46:12
@Katharina It loads okay for me. What url are you using?
Mar 19, 2009 @ 06:51:12
Hi Jane,
I type http://www.dearauthor.com or http://dearauthor.com and both times quantcast appears.
Mar 19, 2009 @ 06:54:37
@Katharina I don’t know what to tell you. It loads fine for me in both firefox and IE.
Mar 19, 2009 @ 06:58:49
That’s ok. I will use IE in the meantime. It will change again, hopefully :-) Thanks
Mar 19, 2009 @ 09:19:20
It’s the opening round! How am I already losing?!
Mar 19, 2009 @ 11:07:05
@Jaime: I sympathize. I tried to enter and kept getting a server timeout error. So no entry for me… Good luck!
Mar 19, 2009 @ 12:46:31
How is it possible that I’m doing better with my NCAA brackets than I am with this? Haha!
Mar 19, 2009 @ 15:17:23
Suggestion? Can you put the time voting ends for each round at the bottom? Or what time the next round is open for voting? I know it’s every six hours, but it’d be easier if I know what time the next round starts so I can check back and vote again, rather than trying to remember what time I last voted. If that makes sense.
Thanks!
Mar 19, 2009 @ 16:23:51
I didn’t think I was doing too badly with 6 out of the first 8. Then I saw the number of people who correctly picked all 8 of the first 8.
Oh well. I knew I wasn’t going to win. Still fun to vote though.
Mar 19, 2009 @ 17:02:26
Hmmmm, my love of contemporaries did me no favors in this competition. well… I’ll go read Kristan Higgans and console myself.
Mar 19, 2009 @ 17:51:08
Egads, I am plummeting through the rankings like an anvil! LOL
Mar 19, 2009 @ 18:51:14
Exactly. I feel like Wyle Coyote looking up at the Roadrunner while plummeting with that anvil in my hands. And I thought I’d gotten better than last year. Jeez…
Mar 19, 2009 @ 19:41:11
@Jayne It’s early yet chicas. Only 8 of the 32 polls are closed. You could rock the house from here on out.
Mar 20, 2009 @ 04:10:06
Wow! Unlawful Contact (my pick) lost to King of Sword and Sky by only 1 vote in set 4.
So close…
Mar 20, 2009 @ 04:17:00
Hmm, it was 128 to 129, but now says 128 to 131. Guess they all weren’t submitted when I looked the first time. Still, that’s really close!
Mar 20, 2009 @ 04:45:09
Katherina might be having a problem with her hosts file. She can goggle for more information about what it is and what it does. Sometimes a redirect is caused by malware so she probably needs to check for that. I run Spybot- Search and Destroy resident.
Mar 20, 2009 @ 06:07:51
I just tried to vote this morning and am being told that I already voted. But I hadn’t.
Mar 20, 2009 @ 07:41:41
@Jayne
I sympathize–I got the same message this morning for one (yes, luckily only one) of the votes.
Because of the block to prevent multiple vote castings by one individual/computer, only one person at my workplace (a public library, as you may be able to guess) is able to vote. I guess the way our computer network is configured causes all our computers (staff and public) to be viewed as one ISP. :(
Mar 20, 2009 @ 15:13:35
I still have no clue how to play this game, but I’m just following links and voting where it says to vote. Haha.
Mar 20, 2009 @ 17:22:41
Am I the only one who picked solely on what I *thought* would win rather than what I *wanted* to win?
Mar 20, 2009 @ 17:23:41
Oops, I forgot to change my posting name back after the other thread.
Mar 20, 2009 @ 18:01:06
I’m making my great comeback! Up from 551 to 480!
Yeah, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson from last year but apparently I didn’t. Once Wile E. Coyote, always Wile E. Coyote.
Mar 20, 2009 @ 18:10:15
Dude, I did a lot better last year. ::hangs head:: I guess I just didn’t have a very good feel for the players.
P.S. Janet– I, too, was trying to be strategic and pick what I thought would win, not necessarily what I wanted to win.
Mar 20, 2009 @ 18:13:52
Yep, me too. And I thought I had done a better job until the voting began and then I looked at my choices and thought, “what was I thinking?” Oh, well, there’s always next year.
::whooooosh:: sound of me still plummeting.
Mar 20, 2009 @ 18:29:48
Robin, I had a hard time with that this year. There were some books that I loved that I thought SHOULD win, and I couldn’t bring myself to predict otherwise. If I had, I would have ended up voting against my own picks! It looks like they almost all lost in the first round, however. Maybe next year I will go ahead and predict that many of my favorite books will lose, even though I will vote for them. Because I can’t possibly do any worse with that strategy.
@Jia: Congrats on moving up! I’m still down at 637 — right below Jayne, it looks like. Once again this year, Nora Roberts is kicking my ass (I love to say that).
Does anyone know if we’re getting a “second chance” bracket again this year? I sucked at that last year too, but it was fun to get back in the game after bombing out in the first two rounds.
Mar 20, 2009 @ 18:48:10
I voted for what I thought would win, at times against books I liked. Obviously I thought wrong – LOL.
And the “close” votes have not gone my way. Bummer!
Mar 20, 2009 @ 18:50:28
That was sort of my theory. But I was betting on m/m being a little more popular than it apparently is. I’m doing pretty good right now, but I think very soon all those picks for ‘Mexican Heat’ are going to start dragging me down.
Mar 20, 2009 @ 20:05:40
Actually, EST=Eastern Standard Time Our clocks are now on EDT=Eastern Daylight Time There is no abbreviation recognized as EST=Eastern SAVINGS Time.
The other confusion can be the fact that many clocks calculate from UCT, which most of us know as GMT. At the moment the east coast is -4 UTC hours, or 4 hours behind behind GMT. The end of the daylight savings we will once again be -5 UTC, 5 hours behind GMT.
I notice wordpress runs off UCT +/- hours, so you must manually set the time for your zone keeping in mind GMT NEVER CHANGES.
This might be what’s confusing the voters as to when polls open and close.
Just a thought. I’m voting but didn’t fill out a ballot because I had read so few of the books. I’m pulling for my favorite author, Loretta Chase to win.
Mar 20, 2009 @ 20:56:30
@SonomaLass Yes, we are definitely doing a second chance bracket. We haven’t decided on the prize yet.
Mar 21, 2009 @ 00:16:18
Yay! Thanks Jane. It’s good to have that to look forward to, as my picks fall by the wayside. The prize doesn’t matter, so much as having a dog in the fight again.
This is so much fun!
Mar 21, 2009 @ 13:58:22
LOL, it’s the same for me! Oh, well, there’s still a chance for me to suck it in the second chance tournament, too.
My strategy made it really difficult for me to vote, because books I pushed ahead in my bracket were not always the ones I wanted to vote for. Argh. I should have had more faith in some of the books I liked and *wanted* to win.
Reading the comments I realize I wasn’t the only one who did this, and damn if I wouldn’t be plummeting anyway, because if I had done it the other way, I probably still would lose, but if I’m going down, I wish I were going down for books I wanted to win.