2021 Swoon Awards- What's Next?

I can't believe we've wrapped up a second year of The Swoon Awards!!!! For a full list of the 2021 Swoon Award Winners and Runner Ups, check out The Swoon Awards website! 

Now that it's been a week since posting the results, I think there's a lot to celebrate. This year we had more participation and continued excitement in each round. I hope this momentum means The Swoon Awards becomes something that #Romancelandia looks forward to. 

As we look ahead to the next round, I think there will be a lot to consider. During the award nominations and voting, The Swoonies pretty much take a neutral stance, but as organizers we see the comments and hear some of the back chatter. We want this award to be a successful initiative so we've adjusted where we can. For instance; we've added some mechanisms to report book concerns and we also made sure narrators got their flowers. But there are aspects of running a popularity reader awards that we cannot avoid. So let's talk, here are a few observations from this year that I want to keep my eye on-

1. Losing diversity in nominations;
2. Less indie authors or smaller press nominees; and 
3. Authors with larger platforms leveraging their readership to essentially shut out other nominees.

As an optimist, I want to make sure we collectively think about how #Romancelandia can account for the above. Here are a few suggestions that I think could help: 

1. Get organized add a Swoon Awards tab to your reading tracker or add a Swoon Nominations shelf to your GoodReads/Storygraph account. One of the things I noticed was readers saying they had to go back to look up what they read from the previous year: 
• I've created an optional Swoon Awards Nomination Workbook as a free resource.
• Feel free to add this workbook once you've saved/downloaded a copy of your own. 
• The first tab/worksheet of the workbook has suggestions and tips to use the tracker.
2. Share The Swoon Awards website with as many romance authors, readers, and reviewers as you know. Word of mouth has helped this initiative grow and it'll be important that we reach readers beyond Book Twitter and Bookstagram. 
• I jokingly said to tell memaw to nominate and vote, but I'm actually quite serious. Tell your friends and particularly readers who read across the genre and to those who read diversely who might not be aware of the awards. Think of it as a Tell a Friend about The Swoon Awards campaign. 
3. Suggest if you have actionable suggestions to improve the awards feel free to DM The Swoon Awards Twitter account or email us at theswoonawards@gmail.com. Adding categories are our number one suggestion just in case you were thinking. 😉

I couldn't end this blog post without giving a huge shout out to The Swoonies Amber, Ari, and Nick. Y'all are true rockstars and I'm so grateful to have the chance to work with you on this project. And, I'm looking forward to the 2022 planning of The Swoon Awards!!!!

Happy Nominating!