Each year the Romance Writers of America hold a contest to choose the "best" romances of the previous year in a number of categories. "Best" gets the air-quotes because RWA's judges don't choose the best from all books but from among the books that actually get entered. Regardless, the nominees are usually great examples of their subgenre.
The 2010 RITA calls are going out today, right now. As part of the excitement, I thought it would be fun to list past RITA winners from the Paranormal category, or whatever name it had at the time. Also, in other categories, I noticed books with paranormal elements. It was interesting to see how, as the years went by, paranormal offerings became more and more prevalent. The books that won, moreover, became more cross-genre. Some of the earlier paranormal winners had less involved worldbuilding and were certainly not the beginnings of series! With this small retrospective, we can kind of see a snapshot of how our paranormal reading material has changed through the years.
If you happen to know I missed a book with paranormal elements or included one that didn't have them, please let me know in the comments.
2009:
Best Paranormal Romance: Seducing Mr. Darcy by Gwyn Cready
Best Young Adult Romance: Hell Week by Rosemary Clement-Moore
Best First Book: Oh. My. Gods. by Tera Lynn Childs
2008:
Best First Book: Dead Girls Are Easy by Terri Garey
Best Novel with Strong Romantic Elements: Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn
Best Paranormal Romance: Lover Revealed by J.R. Ward
Best Young Adult Romance: Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr
2007:
Best Paranormal Romance: A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole
2006:
Best Paranormal Romance: Gabriel's Ghost by Linnea Sinclair
2005:
Best Paranormal Romance: Blue Moon by Lori Handeland
Best Novel With Strong Romantic Elements: A.K.A. Goddess by Evelyn Vaughn
2004:
Best Paranormal Romance: Shades of Midnight by Linda Fallon
2003:
Best Paranormal Romance: Contact by Susan Grant
2002:
Best Paranormal Romance: Heart Mate by Robin D. Owens
2001:
Best Paranormal Romance: The Highlander's Touch by Karen Marie Moning
2000:
Best Paranormal Romance: Nell by Jeanette Baker
1999:
Best Paranormal Romance: The Bride Finder by Susan Carroll
1998:
Best Paranormal Romance: FireHawk by Justine Dare
1997:
Best Paranormal Romance: Stardust of Yesterday by Lynn Kurland (also best first book)
1996:
Best Paranormal Romance: The Covenant by Modean Moon
1995:
Best Paranormal Romance: Lord of the Storm by Justine Davis
1994:
Best Futuristic/Fantasy/Paranormal Romance: Falling Angel by Anne Stuart
1993:
Best Futuristic/Fantasy/Paranormal Romance: Emily’s Ghost by Antoinette Stokenberg
1992:
Best Futuristic/Fantasy/Paranormal Romance: Angel for Hire by Justine Davis
***
Congratulations to all nominees and winners from the past and double congrats to this year's slate. Let me know if you need help picking a dress for the ceremony!
Jody W.
www.jodywallace.com * www.meankitty.com
Step Into The Mists with our adventurous band of award-winning authors to otherworlds of paranormal, SF, fantasy and speculative romance. Nervous? Don't be. The creatures that live here are friendly. Most of the time... This blog is for age 18 and over only.
Showing posts with label RITA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RITA. Show all posts
25 March 2010
25 March 2009
13 Reasons Why Your Book Didn't Final in the RITAs
Is there anything in our little corner of the internet that evokes more angst -- and more ranting -- than RWA's Golden Heart and RITA Awards? Well, there probably is, but since the nominations were announced today (http://tinyurl.com/dmmfpl) I thought it might be a good time to summarize, in a nice, concise list, the most common reasons why manuscripts do not final in the RITA awards.
[[The Golden Hearts, for those of you who aren't part of Romancelandia, are the awards for unpublished manuscripts, and the RITAs are for published manuscripts. Both awards are judged by RWA volunteers in the initial round, and entries are not nominated from all available books. They must be placed in the contest by their authors (or publishers) along with a fee and enough copies to go around. And yes this introduction may look familiar if you also visited my post about the Golden Hearts at The Otherworld Diner. What can I say? I'm strapped for time.]]
(This list presumes your novel is a romance, btw.)
1) Your book was released from a small press or in electronic format. Those books = not allowed in RITAs.
2) Your book was not entered in the RITAs. Authors have to go out of their way to enter--books don't get nominated by other people like they do in the Hugos or the Nebulas.
3) The use of the word "f*ck" in the book caused 3 or more judges to mark it "Not a Romance."
4) The use of the word "qu*eb" in the book caused 3 or more judges to mark it "Not a Romance".
5) When the heroine died in the end but did not return as a corporeal ghost for future love noogins, several of your judges decided the "HEA" was questionable, which affected the score.
6) The hero and heroine found out 3/4 of the way through the book they have the same father.
7) Your kick-ass heroine actually continued to kick ass after the hero was introduced. Including his.
8) The judges noticed that you scribbled out the copyright date of 1997 and wrote in 2008, even though you were really careful and used a fine tip Sharpie. Your book was dinged for being "stale".
9) The meangirl internet haterz (who are also PAN members) torpedoed your score in a vast conspiracy to make sure you never final because they are jalus. (They killed my book! Those bastards!)
10) You accidentally sent in five copies of that cookbook you had printed at Lulu.com of family recipes, and judges had trouble relating to the hero and heroine.
11) The package containing your books was mailed to Rwanda instead of the RWA offices. (The Rwandans enjoyed it quite a bit but since they were not RWA PAN members, their scores didn't count.) http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/RWA
12) In order to cut postage costs, your book was not, in fact, mailed to judges at all but was instead displayed at the mall where random passers by were asked to rate the hotness of the cover on a scale of 1 to 9.
13) One of the other finalists hired a top secret contest SWAT team to break into the RWA offices the night of March 24, 2009, and switch out your scores with hers.
BONUS!
14) Several of your judges, intimidated by their towering stacks of RITA entries, marked your 100,001 word novel as "TL", or "Too Long".
***
I posted the top 10 reasons why your manuscript didn't final in the Golden Hearts at The Otherworld Diner.
Jody W.
http://www.jodywallace.com/
[[The Golden Hearts, for those of you who aren't part of Romancelandia, are the awards for unpublished manuscripts, and the RITAs are for published manuscripts. Both awards are judged by RWA volunteers in the initial round, and entries are not nominated from all available books. They must be placed in the contest by their authors (or publishers) along with a fee and enough copies to go around. And yes this introduction may look familiar if you also visited my post about the Golden Hearts at The Otherworld Diner. What can I say? I'm strapped for time.]]
(This list presumes your novel is a romance, btw.)
1) Your book was released from a small press or in electronic format. Those books = not allowed in RITAs.
2) Your book was not entered in the RITAs. Authors have to go out of their way to enter--books don't get nominated by other people like they do in the Hugos or the Nebulas.
3) The use of the word "f*ck" in the book caused 3 or more judges to mark it "Not a Romance."
4) The use of the word "qu*eb" in the book caused 3 or more judges to mark it "Not a Romance".
5) When the heroine died in the end but did not return as a corporeal ghost for future love noogins, several of your judges decided the "HEA" was questionable, which affected the score.
6) The hero and heroine found out 3/4 of the way through the book they have the same father.
7) Your kick-ass heroine actually continued to kick ass after the hero was introduced. Including his.
8) The judges noticed that you scribbled out the copyright date of 1997 and wrote in 2008, even though you were really careful and used a fine tip Sharpie. Your book was dinged for being "stale".
9) The meangirl internet haterz (who are also PAN members) torpedoed your score in a vast conspiracy to make sure you never final because they are jalus. (They killed my book! Those bastards!)
10) You accidentally sent in five copies of that cookbook you had printed at Lulu.com of family recipes, and judges had trouble relating to the hero and heroine.
11) The package containing your books was mailed to Rwanda instead of the RWA offices. (The Rwandans enjoyed it quite a bit but since they were not RWA PAN members, their scores didn't count.) http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/RWA
12) In order to cut postage costs, your book was not, in fact, mailed to judges at all but was instead displayed at the mall where random passers by were asked to rate the hotness of the cover on a scale of 1 to 9.
13) One of the other finalists hired a top secret contest SWAT team to break into the RWA offices the night of March 24, 2009, and switch out your scores with hers.
BONUS!
14) Several of your judges, intimidated by their towering stacks of RITA entries, marked your 100,001 word novel as "TL", or "Too Long".
***
I posted the top 10 reasons why your manuscript didn't final in the Golden Hearts at The Otherworld Diner.
Jody W.
http://www.jodywallace.com/
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