Toward the end of each calendar year, Outskirts Press specifically nominates a certain percentage of our published titles for that year to submit to the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. Not only is winning an EVVY Award an honor it its own right, but one EVVY Winner then goes on to be named the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year. We have thirteen finalists from among all the books we officially nominated for EVVY consideration. And I just heard from CIPA that Outskirts Press actually published two additional EVVY Finalists, where the authors submitted their books directly, since they resided in Colorado and were members of CIPA personally. Congratulations to them, as well.
Tomorrow evening, Jake Jabs of American Furniture Warehouse fame will be hosting the 18th Annual EVVY Awards where 1st, 2nd, 3rd Place, and Merit Awards will be handed out to all the EVVY finalists from all the participating self-publishers. So, just how are the EVVY Awards judged?
1. Each EVVY judge answers 30 questions for each book they judge. 25 are general questions that are non-category specific and 5 are category-specific questions. The non-category specific questions involve both technical and creative elements about the books, like for instance, does the book have a barcode, does it have an ISBN, does it have a copyright page, etc. 10 questions are true or false and 20 are scored on a scale of 1 (bad) through 100 (perfect)
2. The first round of judging is scored and all books with first phase scores under 50 are eliminated from consideration. The remaining entries are then judged by a different judge answering the same questions and the scores are taken again. All entries that attain a score of 70 or above from the average of both judge’s scores are deemed finalists. These are the 13 (+2) books that represent our EVVY finalists this year.
3. The finalists are then judged a third time. The order of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and Merit awards are determined by a combination of high score, judge’s determination, and overall comparison of other books within the category. This “Category comparison” means that the average scores can be the same across all categories.
4. 1st Place winners score 81 points or above. Books scoring between 74 – 80 are awarded second place.
Stay tuned for the Outskirts Press EVVY winners….
President of Outskirts Press 