The winners of the 2014 Cybils Awards were announced on Saturday. If you missed the announcement, you can see it here. As Publisher Liaison, I’d like to offer my personal congratulations to the winners. The award winning books are the culmination of two separate rounds of judging over five months, and a selection process that involved a total of 129 hardworking judges. Winning a Cybils award is a big deal: out of 1333 eligible nominated and submitted books, only 88 were selected as finalists. Out of those 88 finalists, 13 were selected as winners—one per category. So congratulations, and give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back!
If your book didn’t win, it doesn’t mean we didn’t love it. We can only have one winner per category and, in many cases, choosing one book over all the others is a difficult and sometimes heart-wrenching decision for the judges. All of the finalists are wonderful books that are well-deserving of their place on the shortlist. There are some real gems in the nomination lists as well. Here at the Cybils, one of our primary goals is to promote literacy by helping librarians, teachers, and parents find just the right book for each child, to spark and keep that love of reading. During the off season, we are planning some content to continue to help spread awareness of not only the winners, but the many excellent books that didn’t win as well. So keep an eye out here throughout the year, or subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with what’s happening.
For the winning publishers, authors, and illustrators, attached here are logos that you are welcome to use on your website or blog. If you write a blog post about the Cybils, please let us know and we’ll try to include it in a future follow-up post. We also have book stickers available for both winners and finalists, and you can license a high-resolution image to use in future printings. See the Cybils Awards store to purchase stickers and/or image license.
Thank you for sharing your books with us, and for all your support throughout the awards season. I’ll be in touch in the fall when we start our 2015 season.
— Sheila Ruth, Publisher Liaison
