I seriously wish they would have something like a nomination vote first. To weed out all the wrong books and include all the valid entries. This would also help to weed out the books that don’t really fit the category, are not of the right publication year and “the drive by” fangirl votes that Laurie Gold speaks of.

Then take the top ten books of each category and do a general vote. By doing something like that, I feel that when I do vote in the actual poll, I am voting for a book that has a chance of winning.

Finally, I no longer think AAR or any one romance site reflects what is really going on with readers out there and the romance industry. I also actually really hate the new forums there. Haven’t participated much since she changed them.

For me, 2007 was a very bad romance year. I am hearing this from a lot of fellow readers, but when I say it I feel like the voice of doom. For example, I didn’t really have a really five star favorite historical. Not one that seemed to stand out above all others. Many of the categories are like that for me.

No big. I was just trying to express, however poorly, that I felt that mentioning the poll in conjunction with my favorite reads from last year, might be a shady fangirly thing to do.

I personally love voting in polls. As KristieJ said, even if the author doesn’t win I know at least I recognized her/him. I love voting period. I think it’s because I came of age during all that Clinton/Bush Rock the Vote stuff.

Linnea Sinclair FTW!

When I was 18 I voted in my first general election. I made my selection for president and ignored the remainder of the ballot. My vote still counted.

Actually, this is a VERY important point in politics. Very. People have the right to NOT vote for something they do not feel strongly about or do not feel informed enough about. But most of the time, people who haven’t followed an issue closely enough tend to vote NO on an item. Many, many, many bonds and initiatives are worded so that a NO vote actually puts the thing into effect. (Although that has died down in recent years with more scrutiny of the issue.)

You can leave items blank on any ballot in America and not invalidate your votes. Many voters do not know this.

/end of public service announcement.

Edited to add:

Manipulating data so that it reflects even distribution (voting in many categories, more than on author, etc.) is a CLASSIC example of human mind confusing wide distribution with randomness. Clusters can be random. Because a cluster shows up on your data, it does not invalidate those data points. Humans have an incredible problem understanding this intuitively. Which is why scientists use chi-squared tests and other such techniques to ensure that the data really is relevant. Mucking about in the data points day after day after day, let alone releasing interim results which effect the actions of later voters, invalidates the poll more than ANY drive-by voters or ballot stuffing. Get enough data points, the clusters become less relevant.

Bloodfever is not the #1 choice; the results are listed alphabetically by how I enter them into my database, which is why Atlantis Awakening, which I enter as AA, for instance, might precede Agnes and the Hitman. I indicate that before any of the results are listed; sorry you missed it. And you might be interested to know that Games of Command is on today’s update.

et al -

I’ll sign off now. I didn’t come over here to talk about the actual Dear Author entry other than to apologize for my inartful blog entry and to try and respond to some of the comments in order to clear up misconceptions. It’s not my place, on this blog, to try and defend the poll.

Laurie

Plus, I find it a real pain in the butt to navigate. And the reviews are too bloody long. If I wanted to read a book report, I’d have become a teacher.

Once I’ve read the rest of the responses, perhaps I’ll go blog about why KMM’s Bloodfever (a book I loved and would classify as urban fantasy) was the #1 Sci-Fi/Fantasy romance and Games of Command wasn’t on the list and people should go and vote for it.

Is that shady, it feels kind of shady to me.

So yeah, you have to expect that the results of pretty much any poll will be worthless for most people.

I love romance, and I read quite a bit of it every year–but most of it doesn’t seem to qualify, for one reason or another. Frankly I won’t spend hours figuring out the ballot, and whether my choices are valid, and what not *shrug* Call me lazy.

When I was 18 I voted in my first general election. I made my selection for president and ignored the remainder of the ballot. My vote still counted.