BooktubeSFF Awards discussion

Edit: This thread is for suggesting changes to get feedback and insight from the community. It's a great place to check if you have an idea or suggestion you want to throw out there, but aren't sure how it will work or what it would look like. If you have a concrete rule change you would like to make, there are threads for proposing changes to existing categories, Creating New Categories, and Administrative Changes.

Original post:
Hey All,

We are planning on holding the BooktubeSFF Awards next year, and we plan on making some changes. In order to better represent the community with the award, we'd like input from you all on what you would or would not like to see. If you have suggestions for next year, things you liked or didn't like about this year's awards go ahead and let us know.

A few things that will likely change or stay the same:
1) Timeline - This year we opened nominations and started the selection process relatively late in the year. In 2016 nominations will likely open earlier in the year (although not 100% sure when yet.)
2) The Nominating Period - shorter next year, a week, maybe two weeks. This year nominations were open for one month, but we received 2/3 of the nominations in the first week. There doesn't seem to be that much of a point in having a month long nomination period, but let us know if you really want to have the whole month.

Things we'd especially like feedback on:
1) Popular vs Juried Award - This year we ran the award as a hybrid of the two. Overall, how do people feel about juried awards vs popular vote. Do you have a strong preference?
2) Categories - Do you like the four categories we had this year? More categories? Less categories?

One thing to keep in mind with all suggestions is how difficult it will be to implement the suggestion. Remember we are not a huge organization here, and while there is room for the awards to grow, we'd rather do so at a sustainable rate.

Okay, here are my personal thoughts:

Personally, I'm leaning towards having either "popular vote with hosts" format or more jury members (if the juried portion continues) next year. I like having a group of people get together to discuss the nominated books once a month, but especially this year with several books later in series getting nominated, it was difficult to keep up... and then if you don't read the book as a jury member, you feel like a jerk. Also, scheduling liveshows is difficult, and if we had 10 jury members, but only need 5 to make a quorum and hold the liveshow, that would be a lot easier.

Nicole's Three Stage Voting Plan
1) Phase 1 (nominations): I'm inclined to move the nomination phase up to February or March and have a one week nomination period (this applies regardless of the rest of my plan.) I'd like to up the number of works a person can nominate in the first phase to 3, otherwise nominations run the same as this year, a public write-in vote.
2) Phase 2 (longlist): The top 10 works in each category (or slightly more with ties) would make up the longlist. A public instant run-off vote would be held where everyone can rank their favorites. The longlist voting would open 1 month after the longlist is announced and be open for 1 week.
3) Phase 3 (shortlist) - basically the same as this year's shortlist phase. Read-a-longs, liveshows with hosts/jury, popular vote at the end. Increase number of shortlisted works to 5.

A hypothetical time line for my plan:
February 15th, open nominations for 1 week.
Feb 22nd, nominations close.
Feb 29th, announce longlist. (Nothing happens in March so people have a little time to read anything on the longlist that might jump out at them.)
April 1st, open longlist voting.
April 8th, longlist voting closes.
April 15th, announce shortlist.
May 1st, readalongs and whatnot begin and run through September.
If shortlist is increased to 5 works: shortlist voting opens October 1st and closes October 8th.
Mid-October, winner announced. (If shortlist stays at 3 works, than this time period would be shorter.)

My reasoning: 1) My impression is that people feel the least comfortable participating in the nomination phase. Without seeing numbers from how many people vote in the popular vote (I expect we'll have more participation in the popular vote) I can't say for sure. But I'm under the impression people feel more comfortable voting on an existing list as opposed to nominating works to generate the list.
2) I generally find the nomination phase to be problematic. As this year's Hugo awards show us, it is the easiest phase to game. It's also technically the most difficult phase to execute. For those reasons, I'd like to make it less important in determining the shortlist.
3) If people vote 3 times they're more likely to stay involved in the process.

Potential Problems with Nicole's Plan
1) Three phases of voting is more work for Nicole. (PS if you're interested in helping with the behind the scenes of the awards, let me know! I could especially use help with website development and whatnot as I have little skill in that area.)
2) Potentially favors works which have a lot of name recognition over other works in the longlist voting phase.
3) Creating the Best Short Work longlist: This year, over 50 works were nominated for Best Short Work, but only 7 or 8 were nominated twice. There would be a "must be nominated at least twice" to be included on the longlist rule, and Best Short Work would likely end up with less than 10 options because of it.

I like the categories we have now and want to keep them all. If we made a major change to the voting process and time line (like what I suggested above.) I would want to hold off on adding any new categories until the following year. Just to make sure I can handle the workload, and also to make sure the new system works.

I'm not a big fan on the idea of long list voting because of the reason you mentioned. I like the proposed timeline and the shorter nomination period.

I still like the idea of a jury vote at the end for a winner.
If making the jury larger would help you guys, go for it.

2 topics for each book in the Goodreads group, one to post in while reading, and the other for final thoughts with spoilers.

A Q&A session at the end of each liveshow.

Thinking outside the box here: O.K. a community vote at the end but only community members that end up reviewing the book(short or long, written or video, doesn't matter). Members submit their review url and rating. Then having a website that has something like this:

Shadows of Self
Nicole - review url - 4*
Paul - review url - 3*
Random person that read it - review url - 4*
ect...

Book with the highest percentage score wins. 121/150 possible star ratings. 81%

Not only would this get people to check out other people's reviews/videos it would be more dynamically community based, which Booktube is all about.

Downside is a little more work for the site owner but if people did the format right on the submission in a goodreads post, it would just be copy and pasting. Also, possible influencing of review scores by other members but it wouldn't be that bad.

Paul wrote: "Thinking outside the box here: O.K. a community vote at the end but only community members that end up reviewing the book(short or long, written or video, doesn't matter). Members submit their review url and rating. Then having a website that has something like this: ."

Hey Paul, thanks for the ideas. I like some of the aspects of what you said, but I'd have to rework things a bit for the sake of practicality. I like the idea of having people submit their review links. I think it would be cool if at the end of each readalong month we asked the community to submit links to their reviews and then created a post which lists everyone's reviews. That would add a level of community participation which I like.

In terms of having reviews be a prerequisite to participate in the popular vote... that I'm not so sure about. I feel like it would end up being a lot of work to go through and check everyone's link plus not everyone rates the same in their reviews so if we have some people working on an out of 10 system and some on an out of 5 system, it could get really complicated in terms of tabulating the results. Also, what do I do if someone submits the wrong link? Do I go searching through their website to see if they actually reviewed the book or just throw out their ballot?

If we keep the award as a juried award, having the popular vote be essentially and aggregate rating might not be a bad idea. I'd make a voting form where people can rate each book 1-5 stars in increments of 0.5 and include "did not read" and "did not finish" options. Then report the aggregate rating for the community, the percent of people who submitted ballots and did not read and did not finish each book. It might give a more accurate picture of how the community felt about each of the nominated works and would make it so the works aren't directly competing against each other. Which would work well for a juried award because then we still have community feedback without having two winners.

What do you think of my re-interpretation of your idea?

I like it. I like the idea of getting the community more involved but trying to keep the integrity of the winner.

Another thought I had is having an open jury that is opened to all booktube creators that read the books that are nominated. The short list of 5 novels gets put out. The content creators read the books during the readalongs or whenever. There is a prerequisite that you must have read 4 out of the 5 of the nominated books to vote. At the end of the readalongs, the content creator makes their own BooktubeSFF video, ranking the books in the order they want to win. They then submit, either via a webpage form, or just a goodreads post their results. All the results get tabulated and the result is the winner.

This allows much more community involvement, more spread of booktubesff awards on each channel, and promotes the books more too.

I might be making things a little too messy but I'm just trying to brainstorm ideas of making it more of a community thing and it being promoted more. Only problem is that other people's reviews might color the way others vote but I don't think it would be that big of an issue within booktubesff.

I was thinking on the Categories and I think there should be a few more. I think for sure there should be Best Fantasy and Best Science Fiction because to me they get lopped into one category when they are not the same. One of these may end up getting best novel too but it at least gives one more book a chance to get in.

I actually like the current three book shortlist. Even now, with ties and books being part of a longer series, there was much more to read than just three for each category!

I'm torn between a juried vs popular vote. The juried one works because the participants have read all the books in every category, and so have an informed vote. But I have to admit that when I first heard about the awards, I thought they would be a popular vote, and would perhaps tell more about the community's views. Or would the most popular authors just win? I don't know!

I really think the longlist approach would help the short story category. It would open people's eyes to more options for short stories, instead of just the one or two that first come to mind. For example, I'm not a big short story reader, so I didn't really come up with many things to nominate. This year I found my nominee by reading a few works from the shortlists of other awards - but a longlist would help! Although it might suffer from the problem you stated, that not enough stories would get enough votes... Short stories just need more visibility in some way.

I really liked how the awards went with the jury this year, having just finished watching it (great job everybody) :D but definitely involve more people in that if it would help you out.
I also think it's a good idea to start earlier in the year because even though I found out too late to start reading this year I think the longer time there is to read the nominations the better.
In terms of categories, I really liked the ones you had as they brought up a range of topics to discuss. I'm torn between suggesting you get rid of the YA category and keeping it because watching everyone discuss the YA was hilarious but I'm not sure if the jury enjoyed it? I'm a big YA reader though but I definitely agree with what you guys said particularly for Heir of Fire xD I'm definitely turning to see the flaws in it and liking more mature things. (Sorry that but was less about suggestions for the awards)
That's all the suggestions I have but grey job this year I think it was fantastic :)

*great job

Good job organising the awards, and I very much enjoyed the "live show" but I can never get google hangouts to work properly (I have to watch 'after the fact' once uploaded)

My main suggestion is not reading all the books in a series. The award is for a particular book it shouldn't be dependant on whats come before. If it's good enough to be "Best Book" it should be able to stand on its own.
It was interesting to see where the popular vote differed from the jury vote, so I think it would be good try and keep that.

WELL DONE ALL :)

I'm a little late in responding to this, but I would just like to say that this was a fantastic idea and you ran it brilliantly! I would also like to second the idea of separating fantasy from Sci-fi as they are quite different genres, and it did feel a little strange having 'The Martian' go up against 'Words of Radiance' which, as part of their respective genres, do very different things. I hope this is helpful! Let me just emphasise again that I really enjoyed this, and really appreciate the hard work you all put into making it happen!

Hey all, thanks for the responses and suggestions (and kind words.) In 2016, because we moved the timeline up and had a quick turn around, we decided not to make any major changes to the awards layout. Still open to suggestions for next 2017.

Regarding breaking the best novel categories into best fantasy and best science fiction; while I agree with your reasoning for the two genres being really different, I'm not sure how realistic it is for us to do that. It would mean the judges would be potentially reading 12 novels (3 best novel SF, 3 best novel fantasy, 3 best novel YA SF, and 3 best novel YA fantasy.) Perhaps if we extended the time line that would work, but with the timeline we have now, I don't think it's reasonable.

As there is so much adult fiction out there and the majority of participants are adults (I think?) how about doing 3 best fantasy novels, 3 best science fiction novels and 3 SFF ya novels?

I like Ellie's suggestion. I think SF and fantasy could be separate categories to avoid the over-domination of fantasy that seems prevalent on booktube in general. But for the YA category they could be combined (or YA could be done away with :P).

I agree with Ellie and Katherine, it's really hard to narrow down the best SFF novels to just two books in one category... If it's not possible to make two separate categories, it would be nice to be able to nominate more books to broaden the selection.

I'm still not sure splitting science fiction and fantasy into their own categories is reasonable form a judge's perspective. We can see how this year goes and how people feel about it, but potentially reading 9 novels (plus back reading) is daunting.

My 2 penneth worth
I understand the splitting and agree with Katherine about the domination of fantasy, but this is booktube/youtube. (young people)
But I have sympathy for the judges, we shouldn't expect too much!
My view on 'back reading' is unchanged.
Also, where the lines between genres is is 'iffy'.
Janes list of possible 2015 novels, where is Signal to Noise, or All the Birds? What counts as YA?
One solution is to split the judges, a fantasy panel, and a scl-fi panel. (the announced selection leans a bit towards fantasy)

There are other SFF booktubers, what about dragging in Rachel (Kalanadi) or Bri (stories from the shelf) and Brock?
Or Becky M, Kathrine, Joe ? Winx?
I know this is making more work for someone? (the price of 'internet fame')
But we love you for it! :)

In my opinion any poll is a popular vote, no matter what kind it is.

I'm interested in this idea of splitting judging panels. I'm ALL in favor of reading new things on shortlists and outside of my comfort zone, of course!

But if changes are made that expand the shortlists, increase the number of categories, and increase the reading load on judges, I would like to know how workable multiple judging panels would be. I have no experience, no clue if this happens in other awards.

Ya'll know I love sci fi, so I would be happy to read/judge adult and YA sci fi categories, if fantasy and sci fi were split (for example). I'd do my darndest to read all the fantasy too, of course :-)

I agree, there should be a Science Fiction and Fantasy category separate of each other because so much more people read Fantasy than Science Fiction. This is just the case in general, not only for Booktube. I've seen that also to be the case for the last 5 or so years I've been here on Goodreads.

The Martian was a special case that I think that basically almost everyone loved. It was not mainly about the science fiction, but about the main character's struggles.

But I also think having Science Fiction and Fantasy that this might not as challenging as one would think because so many Booktube read and focus more on new releases unless its a popular book. I'll bet many of Booktubers have already read many of the nominations.

In my opinion, the booktubesff awards is all about bringing the community together and reading the most liked books. This is more a group thing than a traditional rewards. I'd love to see more group participation this year.

As much as splitting the two genres up would allow more science fiction to be visible, I think the majority of people will just read the books they want to read anyway. I know that is what I would do because committing to 6 adult books in a more limited time frame is difficult and getting all those books is tough. Keeping the short list to 3, having solid books that everyone voted for the most, has a larger chance for the average user to actually read those 3 books. Not to mention buying or borrowing 3 books is much easier than 6.

Elizabeth wrote: "I think this makes a lot of presumptions about what booktube is and what 'it' reads. It's easy to assume that the majority are young and read YA or fantasy but that doesn't always hold up.

The Ma..."

Yes, All the Birds was not a good example, sorry.
My point was more about deciding genres, it's hard.
Signal to Noise could be YA, although I would say, adult-ish fantasy.
Illuminae is YA, but you could make an argument for it also being a 'graphic novel' (which I'm not)
Putting things in boxes is hard. :)

Alistair wrote: "Putting things in boxes is hard. :) "

I agree! Nicole has pulled me up on a few books I would have said were YA which the judges have determined are not. But I'm perfectly happy for other people to be making those decisions not me!

Rachel (Kalanadi) wrote: "I'm interested in this idea of splitting judging panels. I'm ALL in favor of reading new things on shortlists and outside of my comfort zone, of course!

But if changes are made that expand the sh..."

The splitting of panels was just a bit of 'blue sky' thinking.
Rather than expecting the judges to read everything, dividing the workload.
If they/you read all good, but it's a lot in limited time.
I haven't given it a lot of deep thought, and obviously, will need input from those involved.

Jane (yesmissjane) wrote: "Alistair wrote: "Putting things in boxes is hard. :) "

I agree! Nicole has pulled me up on a few books I would have said were YA which the judges have determined are not. But I'm perfectly happy f..."

It's always better with other people making decisions! LOL :)
(I suspect I'll regret posting that!)

Paul wrote: "In my opinion, the booktubesff awards is all about bringing the community together and reading the most liked books. [...] As much as splitting the two genres up would allow more science fiction to be visible, I think the majority of people will just read the books they want to read anyway."

^ This, I agree. And I want to participate much more this year and read more of the shortlist, and that didn't happen last year because I couldn't get hold of many of the books, so I understand the reader's constraints too.

Alistair wrote: "The splitting of panels was just a bit of 'blue sky' thinking."

I still think it's an interesting idea! Because it does seem that people want more items in each category and/or more categories, and the judges' reading workload is a limiting factor. However, I like the idea of this award being a more casual group read than a complicated setup.

Rachel (Kalanadi) wrote: "Paul wrote: "In my opinion, the booktubesff awards is all about bringing the community together and reading the most liked books. [...] As much as splitting the two genres up would allow more scien..."

This is 'suggestions for the future'.
I don't know how it'll work out? But everyone talking about options/possibilities/suggestions etc. is good.
And I hope adds to notions of community and common interest.
One of the best bits of 'booktube' is that we can give opinions and preferences without 'negativity'.
Ideas can bring people together, get them talking, and thinking.

A couple of thoughts:

1) I'm thinking it might be a good idea to have the definition of a short work be under 150 pages or 40,000 words. This would make everything eligible in the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novella eligible for us and would hopefully reduce confusion on that point. The trend of having novellas with illustrations and crazy typeset and formatting is causing problems there. I'm still a little leery of using word count as a category determinant since it's not an easy piece of information to look up. What do you all think?

2) While there are more people on booktube who read a lot of fantasy, it doesn't mean it will sweep the nominations. Last year, 3 of 5 best novel nominees were sci-fi, and we don't really have enough evidence to say if the nominees will continue to have a pretty even split or lean more towards fantasy. Personally, I expect this will fluctuate year to year depending on which works are eligible.

3) From the perspective of organizing and executing the voting, I'm against the idea of creating separate fantasy and sci-fi panels. This would effectively add 4 categories to the voting forms, doubling the size of the awards. If this turns out to be a popular idea a lot of people get behind, I'll do it, but it will take substantially more work to organize and execute.

I'm also really not sure how well enforcing the split between sci-fi and fantasy would go. Especially, in the best graphic work category were there are a lot of works I consider both. The answer could be to allow people to nominate works twice in both sci-fi and fantasy. Although, that might also get messy. Right now, the categories are intended to be mutually exclusive so it could also be confusing.

My suggestion for the future:
A Cover Art Category

I love art, particularly beautiful art all the better and I have to say I am occasionally guity of buying a book purely for the cover art. I think cover artists are hugely undervalued on Booktube and in the publishing world generally too. I feel it's only right that from next year we include a cover artist section which will honour the artists and recognise their work. This will also allow people who have less reading time/don't read new releases, a good chance to still vote, nominate and get involved in the awards.

Let us know if you think this a good suggestion and tell me some of the ones from 2015 you would have nominated if we had a category for it this year!

I think that cover art is a great category and I would love to see it next year along with a worst cover art category too as I feel that SFF especially seems to come up with some shockers and would love to celebrate the good the bad and the ugly

Kaitlin wrote: "My suggestion for the future:
A Cover Art Category

I love art, particularly beautiful art all the better and I have to say I am occasionally guity of buying a book purely for the cover art. I th..."

This is an incredible idea! I'm a sucker for a good cover (aren't we all). It's unfortunate that cover artists in general don't get more recognition and this might be a nice way to illustrate just one of those little areas of publishing we maybe take for granted?

Just to chime in on the discussion about splitting the categories, I think overall it'd be much easier to keep them together. I also do agree that the numbers between SF/F will change over the years as Nicole said. It's one of those things that just varies, as she pointed out Fantasy is visibly the more popular genre but SF still won pretty solidly last year.
Being practical it is just easier on judges, and honestly on us reading along. I would love to be able to read everything on the shortlist this year but splitting would probably really slow me down. Not to mention keeping them together I think would do better to focus the voting.

Also, on the short fiction topic that's probably a good idea. It is hard to tell sometimes what length an actual short work is - page counts are almost always off in some way. I like the idea of word count, but as you stated it's sometimes hard to find that.

That's a great idea Kaitlin!
If we had this category I would have nominated The Dinosaur Lords, I hated the book but the cover art by Richard Anderson was absolutely gorgeous! :D

Ooh yes, Dinosaur Lords did completely suck in my opinion but I loved the dynamism of the cover!!

I dislike all of Tad Williams books, but always attracted to them because of Michael Whelan's amazing artwork.

If there is artwork I would always nominate Whelan or Lockwood. Their my favorite artist and I know they have to paint at least one book a year.

Kaitlin wrote: "My suggestion for the future:
A Cover Art Category

I love art, particularly beautiful art all the better and I have to say I am occasionally guity of buying a book purely for the cover art. I th..."

I'm fine with this category. It will probably take some tweaking to make the eligibility requirements more clear. For example, would people be nominating the cover of a specific book or that artist's work on all the covers they did that year. This has also gotten me thinking more about how we should go about approving new categories, for more on that, see the second half of this post.

Elena wrote: "I think that cover art is a great category and I would love to see it next year along with a worst cover art category too as I feel that SFF especially seems to come up with some shockers and would..."

I'd rather not have this as an official category. I'd be a little sad if the booktubesff awards turned into the Razzies of publishing. If this is something people are interested in, we could potentially do an informal one stage poll here on the goodreads group (for cover art or any other category.)

Brainstorming mechanisms for change to the BooktubeSFF Awards

Okay, so obviously people have ideas for things they would like to see in the future. Now is a good time to take a step back and decide how we are going to expound upon these changes and make them into rules, vet a new rule, and adopt a new rule for the awards.

Here is what I'm thinking

Step 1: Leave this thread open as a sort of general brainstorming, throwing out ideas, I just want initial feedback but don't have all the details worked out, place (i.e. this thread will stay here and be what it is.) If you have a thought and want to see if there are like minded people who might support your rule change, this will still be the place to post.

Step 2: Open new threads for more in depth discussion of fleshed out rule changes which the creator believe have some level of community support. Right now, I'm thinking four broad threads: proposed changes to existing categories (ex: what I said about changing the wording for best short work,) proposed new categories (ex: dividing best novel into best sci-fi and best fantasy or best cover art,) proposed changes to the awards timeline (ex: proposing a 2 week nominations period instead of a 1 week nomination period or proposing nominations being in March instead of February,) and proposed systemic changes to the awards (ex: proposing two separate awards panels, one for science fiction and one for fantasy or proposing 3 rounds of voting instead of two.)

At this point, someone who feels strongly about the proposed rule change would write up a more in depth explanation. Explanation would include: Brief overview of the proposed change, rational in favor of the rule change, eligibility requirements as they would appear on the nomination ballot (if applicable,) how the rule change would be implemented, potential problems caused by the rule change, and how the creator of the rule change foresees those problems being resolved. The rule change would then be discussed and modified as needed.

Step 3: A poll to implement rule changes. My plan would be to open a poll with all the rule changes after the final winners are announced liveshow of the year. There would then be some period for voting on the proposed changes. I haven't quite worked out what the criteria would be to move a proposed rule change from step 2 into the poll in step 3. Possibly some system of seconding from within the discussion threads, I'm not sure. Of the four types of rule changes, some would be exclusive within their category and some would not.

Changes to existing categories would not exclude each other as I foresee these being relatively minor changes in wording to the existing categories to make them more clear. I'd prefer to have new category creation be an exclusive change with only the most widely liked new category being added to the ballot the following year. I don't really want to add more than one category a year to the ballot and I want to avoid the awards becoming bloated with too many categories. Changes to the timeline... I'm not sure about this yet. Some proposals here might clash with each other, but not all of them. Hm, need to think more about how this would work in a poll. And systemic changes to the awards would exclude other systemic changes and possible exclude other rule changes as well (i.e. if a systemic change happened, I'd want to hold off adding any new categories that year.) I want to make creating a systemic change rather difficult as I don't want the awards to change drastically every single year.

Okay, that was rather long and rambley. Let me know what you all think. How do you want to go about proposing (in more detail,) vetting, and implementing rule changes to the awards going forward.

Nicole wrote: "Kaitlin wrote: "My suggestion for the future:
A Cover Art Category

I love art, particularly beautiful art all the better and I have to say I am occasionally guity of buying a book purely for the..."

I'm super late to the party, but I like your ideas Nicole! I agree that you shouldn't change the awards too much all at once, it would become too unstable. And other changes don't have to be so drastic as well. For example: instead of having two categories, one for Best SF Novel and one for Best Fantasy Novel, we can just set a minimum number of nominated works from either of the two categories each year - so that, for example, there are always the same amount of nominated SF and Fantasy books for the category. Not sure how that would work, but I'm throwing it out there.

Anyway, I haven't read the entire thread yet, so if those suggestions are way off feel free to ignore it completely! haha

Otavio wrote: "For example: instead of having two categories, one for Best SF Novel and one for Best Fantasy Novel, we can just set a minimum number of nominated works from either of the two categories each year - so that, for example, there are always the same amount of nominated SF and Fantasy books for the category. "

Hm, I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm not sure if I support or don't support it. It sounds like it would require us to go up to 4 works in a category which is an issue aside form the main issue. I guess I'm not sure how much this solution addresses the issues those who want two categories raise. It addresses the issue of sci-fi being less popular, but not the issue of whether comparing the two is fair and/or valid. What do people who want two separate categories think? Would this solution appeal to you?

I support the split for a few reasons.
For one, popular tastes change. SF is less popular now, but it will boom again when fantasy fades. Popularity should be a non-issue, in my opinion.
Second, the differences between genres. Sure, there's a fair bit of blending, but we all know the differences, and we all know our preferences. The split caters to that, and also makes it easier to break out of your usual patterns, as it gives you a set canon for a genre you may be interested in.
Three, separating genres sidesteps the comparison issue, and keeps either set of fans from feeling slighted.
Finally, it gives us all more books to discover and, hopefully, enjoy. And isn't that why we're all here?

Obviously, this is all personal opinion, and cons can be brought up against, and even from, most if not all of my points.
Otavio's solution is interesting, but problematic, as it does require direct comparison between two fundamentally different genres.

Hello everyone who is interested in proposing a change to the BooktubeSFF Awards. I have now created threads were you may propose concrete changes to the awards: changes to existing categories, Creating New Categories, and Administrative Changes. If you want to speculate about changes that might work, this thread is still the place for you, but if you are ready to take the next step and propose a change you would like to see implemented in 2017 (or beyond,) those threads are the place to do it.

When the 2016 winners are announced, I plan to run a public vote on proposals which have been accepted. Those which receive enough support will become rules in the following year. I am still uncertain what exactly will be required for a proposal to be "accepted" and included in the public poll. Depending on how active and productive the threads are, it may be a community driven process or the judges might vote on putting the rule changes into the poll. I'll note that I would like to retain some level of executive veto power for rule changes which I believe would be technically impossible for me to implement.

I look forward to disusing any concrete rule changes you all propose in the new threads, as well as, commenting on whatever half-backed suggestions and ideas you have to suggest in this thread.

My suggestion doesn't fit anywhere but I'll mention it any way.

I think there should be spaces to invite 1-3 guest judges pulled from booktube at large (perhaps one or some of the permanent judges steps down to make room). It's an uncomfortable fact that all the booktube SFF judges are well, white (and mostly girls!).

Why? Inviting guest judges will address gender imbalance and racial diversity.