Sheila Ruth, Publisher Liaison
Publishers, publicists, and authors: now that the public nomination period has ended, we are accepting submissions from publishers, publicists, and authors of books published within the last year. Some of your titles may already have been nominated by the public. Those titles do not need to be submitted again.
Whether or not you are submitting additional titles, we request that you provide review copies (electronic or print) of the nominated titles for the judges. Judges do their best to obtain nominated titles from the library, but we are an all-volunteer organization with no budget to purchase books, and we do not ask judges to spend money out of pocket. Although we do our best to fairly consider each book, in some cases lack of availability can hamper a book’s chances, because if judges can’t read the book, they can’t judge it.
Currently, we are still processing the nominations that came in during the public nomination period. Once our processing is complete, I will send out a list of your nominated titles to each publisher for which I have or can find contact information. I do not send nomination lists to authors, unless the author is also the publisher. This process takes time, as I have to process and send each one individually, so I ask that you please be patient as I work through them.
The best thing that you can do to help with this step is to make sure that I have up to date contact information for your company. I particularly have problems with the large publishers, because of the high turnover rates from year to year, and often my contact from the previous year is no longer with the company. I also often have problems with independent or self-published authors, some of whom don’t have a website, and even some who have a website don’t have an email address on their website. If I have been in contact with you previous years for the Cybils, then I still have your contact information and you don’t need to resend it.
You don’t need to wait to hear from me to submit. You may submit any time between now and October 25, according to the information in our Publisher & Author Submissions page, but if you expect to have more than a few books nominated by the public, you might prefer to wait for the list to see which books were nominated before selecting which additional books you want to submit.
At this time, all we need is the spreadsheet with your list of submitted titles. After we receive your spreadsheet, it will be loaded into our system using an automated program, which is why the information in the spreadsheet must adhere exactly to our guidelines. Then, the submitted titles will be checked by the Category Chairs to makes sure they are eligible and placed in the correct category. Judges will then check their library for availability of each title, and enter that information into our database. Once that is complete, I will generate the review copy request and send it to you. It may be several weeks after your submission before you receive the review copy request.
We will request a review copy for each judge who cannot obtain the book in the library. You may send print or electronic review copies. Print copies may be sent directly to the judges at the addresses I will provide. For electronic review copies, we generally prefer files with no DRM to be sent directly to me, but we will be glad to use whatever system works best for you for distributing electronic review copies to the judges.
Please email me at publishers@cybils.com if you have any questions or need anything. I will respond as soon as possible, but it may not be right away.
Thank you.
Sheila Ruth
Publisher Liaison