Well, as all things WWEnd do, it took us longer to get this feature out to you guys but it's finally here.  At least the first piece...

You can now start building your personal Award Worthy Books List in My World!  For any book first published in 2015 you'll find a check box to add the book to your list.  The check box matches the genre for the book so an SF book will only have the option to add that book to your SF list.  Some books that straddle the line between genres like fantasy/horror will give you 2 choices and you can pick the one that you think it fits best.

So for example, you really loved Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson:

• You go to the Aurora page
• tag the book as read
• check the box that says "Add to My Science Fiction List" in the Award Worthy Books section
• click Submit

You're done.

You can see your recent activity on the profile page in My World where we show your latest 5 picks regardless of genre.  Click the section header to get the main page that shows all your picks and available slots for each of the 3 genres.  Click the genre headers on the My Award Worthy Books List page to get to the Books Published by Year list so you can find eligible new books to add to your list.

As always, if we're missing a book you want to add to your list you can make your requests in the forum and one of our Ubers will take care of you.

The second part of the Award Worthy Books project is the main list.  We're going to let some data build and test for the rest of this week then make that list available to everyone.

Some tips to keep in mind:

• you must tag the book as read to activate the check box that lets you add the book to your list
• only 5 pics per genre - the check box will be disabled when you reach the max
• you can change your picks anytime you want so you don't have to horde those precious slots - just put on the best books you're read so far - they can always be replaced if you read a better book later

Give it a go and let us know here what you think or if you run into any problems or have any questions.  Your feedback is valuable so we can't wait to hear your thoughts.

Read on!

The check box is under the RYO stuff and above the submit button.  It's part of the BookTrackr section so it won't show if you're not logged in but you should be seeing it otherwise.  Perhaps your novel page is cached.  Try a hard refresh and see if that does it.  Otherwise try logging out and back in. 

Awesome!!

I ran into a couple hiccups as I was going through this.

The first was that I couldn't seem to be able to rate a newly read book and add it to my Science Fiction list at the same time.  I had to rate it, submit, then go back, add it to the list, and resubmit.  I played around with this.  If, as per the instructions, I click the "Read" radio button, the Science Fiction list checkbox becomes enabled.  However, if I simply click the stars to rate the book (my normal procedure), the "Read" radio button automatically becomes selected but the Science Fiction list checkbox is not enabled.

Secondly, when I tried to add Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest, the Science Fiction list checkbox wasn't available.  This is a translation date issue:  the book was first published in English in 2015 but was originally published in Chinese in 2008.

Congrats on the new feature!!  I'm really looking forward to seeing the main list!

Forgot about the rating stars switching the not read to read.  We'll look into it and get that fixed.  The translation will be a bit more involved.  It's just nothing we thought about.  We'll find a way to make it work.

Glad you like the new feature.  We'll launch the big list soon.  We have a few bugs to work out first.  Should only be a few days.

Did your award worthy book disappear from your list?  Well, that's on us.  It turns out we left out the bit of code that restricted the selection to novel only and a few folks tagged collections and novellas before we could fix it.  It's fixed now and we removed the 4 non novels.  Sorry for the confusion.

Next year we'll probably have more categories.  We want to work out the bugs with just novels for this short run. 

Engelbrecht - 2015-10-31 4:23 PM Dave,

Maybe you should make a blog post announcement for this - I suspect that a lot of casual members won't have noticed this thread...  

The main list is up now.  I'll me sending out a mass email to all members with this new feature as well as a bund of other updates since the last email.  After that I'll post it in the blog.

Ya'll check out the list and let us know what you think.

The change should be automatic but it may require a hard refresh to get the results to show.  Or, it could be that there is a job that runs on that page every once in awhile that will update the data.  If that's the case it'll be avery 15 minutes or so I would guess.  I just don't remember which it is.  Try refreshing the page and see if you see your votes.  Do keep in mind that other folks could have tagged or un-tagged some books in the mean time so it may not be obvious.

OK, so what happened was with the new year the code was using the current year instead of the 2015 award year we wanted.  I've updated all the books tagged as award worthy since 1/1 to 2015 and all 31 votes are now showing in the list.  whargoul is fixing the code so it won't happen anymore.

I was starting to wonder where all the votes were!

These lists have really blossomed!!

It's been interesting to see leaders emerge from the pack.  There are some interesting books that hadn't really been on my radar, so more for the TBR pile!

It's also interesting to compare the lists to a similar vote-ranked list over at Goodreads as well as to the current Locus Recommended Reading List .  Lots of overlap, but certainly some differences as well - some of which seem surprising.

Lastly, Jo Walton's Thessaly books are kind of getting short shrift - votes are being split between two different books and between two different lists (I'm surprised that they're sometimes considered SF - all the (spoiler alert) time travel and robots are by the grace of the Greek gods, i.e. magic.  The only real SF occurs right at the end of book 2).  Anyhow, if you total up all the disparate votes, it currently adds up to 7, which places them near the top.

Yeah, I'm really pleased with how the lists are turning out too.  I do wish we had more participation but for our first year it's not too bad.  I expect it will grow bigger over time.

Yeah, the code takes the earliest date.  I've taken out the 2008 pub reference so you can tag it now.  The awards it would be up for that concern us here are all English language awards and they'll take from the date of translation.  I made a note in the synopsis so that should cover it.  Thanks for pointing that out.

Yes, the list closed on March 1st.  We had a miscommunication over the end date and I was saying mid March when whargoul was coding it for the first.

There have been some discussions about leaving it open indefinitely so we can grow the list more and give people more time to add books etc.  We have not arrived at a decision yet though we're leaning towards cutting it off.  The purpose of the list is to be a guide for folks who vote in the yearly awards and is more of a snapshot of what was popular leading up to the awards -- much like the awards themselves.  It's almost a WWEnd award in a sense.  If we leave it open we'd be changing it completely.  It would still have some value as a best of the year list that would change over time as people read and add their favorites.

I'm a little torn myself to be honest which is why we've just left it alone the last few weeks.  What do you all think?  Any preferences either way?  I'd like to hear arguments for and against.  We'll need to decide if we're going to stick to the original plan or if we want to let it morph into something different.  Either way we'll be opening up the 2016 voting at the end of the month.

I'm glad you like it - we think it's pretty cool too.

Whargoul and I talked about how to proceed with it and here's where we landed.  We're going to leave the Award Worthy list open for 2 full years so folks have enough time to read the new stuff.  that means the 2015 list will stay open until the end of 2016 then it will cut off midnight Dec 31.  The 2016 list will stay open until the end of 2017 and so forth.

That way the list will continue to be an incentive to read the newer books but will allow plenty of time for folks to get those reads in.  And of course it will also still be available as a recommendation engine for those awards voters looking for ideas of what to read.

We hope you all like the new plan.  We'll be putting it into action in the next few days but since Whargoul is out on vacation it may take a little longer.  We should have the 2016 list up next week.  By the way, you can already tag books for 2016 - you just won't be able to see your list yet.

The Award Worthy list is now turned back on for 2015 books.  You can add books to your 2015 list all the way through the end of 2016.

We'll be updating the list and the page in My World to include the 2016 Award Worthy list soon.

The list is actually Award Worthy Novels not books. We changed the name some time ago to help prevent confusion but we still have places where it's referred to as the generic "books". You can only add books that have been entered into the DB as novels. Spindle was incorrectly listed as a novel which is why you could put it on your list. I've changed it to novella now so you can't do that anymore. We don't always get those right unfortunately. If you come across other errors like that please let us know so we can make corrections.