Newbery Committee Inside Insights: How members organize, store, track, and evaluate hundreds of books in a year
Besides looking at this year’s crop of Newbery contenders, Emily and I will do a few shared “Inside Insights” posts where we look back at our own Newbery experiences. The idea is to give an inside view of some of the nuts and bolts of being on the Newbery Committee. We’re glad to answer questions and would also love to hear from others about their own Committee experiences.
[Steven] We’ll start out with one of the questions I’ve been asked most often: How many books do you get? Publishers begin sending books to each Newbery Committee member around March, and they keep coming all year. In both of my Newbery years (2010 and 2013) I started off determined to keep track of how many I received, but gave up pretty quickly. My best guess is that I got about 600 books each year. Emily, do you know how many you received? And how did you keep all those books organized?
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[Emily] I was going to guess more like 1,000, it was so fun to get the boxes and boxes of books. I tried to explain to staff at my library how many books were coming, but they did not believe me until they saw all the boxes! I also enjoyed how some of the boxes had special presentation like fall leaves or confetti (though this didn’t change any opinions).
I organized my books with washi tape… different colors if a book was suggested or nominated, etc. I’m not sure how people organize themselves these days when they don’t get as many physical books…
[Steven] I was wondering how e-books have affected this process. Emily, do you know how many actual hard copies committee members get? 50%? 25%? Maybe a recent member can give us an update.
[Emily] I had a friend who was on the committee during 2020 (so 2021) award year and I think it was like 10%. I’m hoping it went up since then for organization’s sake LOL.
[Steven] During a mid-year meeting one year we members shared how we took notes as we read during the year. I was impressed with the variety of methods. One person described a complex system of colored post-its; another mentioned some high tech tools that were way over my head; one member said she takes no notes at all on the first read because she wants to experience each book as a reader first, not a critic. I love that last answer, but could never manage it. The books all run together if I don’t write stuff down as I’m reading. I jotted notes on a piece of paper as I read, then typed up those notes into neater bullet points on one very very long word document (I still do this, but am only at 39 pages so far this year).
[Emily] Notes? Almost 40 pages of notes? You’re funny…. The brain is a wonderful thing I always say (oh maybe this is why I always get my characters and books mixed up… hmmmm…)
[Steven] Just looked it up: I had 166 pages for my first Newbery year…
[Emily] I have definitely been guilty of reading books twice by accident (more often for Heavy Medal I’ll say) where I’m listening to an audio book and go hmm… this sounds familiar.
And of course the ever terrible mistake that happens every year. Reading an ineligible book!! That is the worst! What are your Newbery mishaps Steven?
[Steven] I had the ineligible thing too. I was halfway through THE LOST CONSPIRACY by Frances Hardinge, thinking: “this is it!,” then remembered that she’s from England. I still love that book…
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[Emily] On the topic of mishaps I also was so paranoid that I was going to miss a book. We tend to always do this on Heavy Medal and you reassure me that its OK. But my Newbery year I was frantically reading EVERYTHING and scouring our new book shelves and reading all the blogs making sure I didn’t miss anything. I remember one person saying I don’t want to be the next Charlotte’s Web committee.
[Steven] I was especially nervous during my year as Chair that we would miss something. Especially when you get to November, and books are still being released. So at least one person has to catch those late publications, and if they look like contenders, quickly get the word out so all members can read it. (Kudos to the 2022 Committee for not missing A SNAKE FALLS TO EARTH, which, if my research is correct, was released later than any other Medal or Honor book in the past 25 years: November 23rd!)
[Emily] Speaking of being chair, Did you get more books as chair? Did you get all the self published books? Or did that start after your time?
[Steven] I’m pretty sure I was one of the first chairs who was the designated recipient of the self-published books. It wasn’t true when I was a member of the 2010 committee…we all received some. In my chair year, self-published books all came to me, not the members. My job was to review them and identify any that look like they could be contenders. If any are found, we would then request copies for all members. The chair could enlist the help of members with this process, but the books come to him or her first. I’m not allowed to say how many, if any, self-published books were forwarded to the committee, though.
[Emily] Thanks for all the intel Steven! I love hearing about what other people do! We’d love to answer more questions in the comments and will be back next month with more Newbery Committee Inside Insights!!
[Steven] And if you’ve served on the Newbery Committee (or another award committee), feel free to share what you can about your experience…
Filed under: Newbery Experience, Process
About Steven Engelfried
Steven Engelfried retired from full-time library work a couple years ago and now works as a part-time Youth Librarian at the West Linn Public Library in Oregon. He served on the 2010 Newbery committee, chaired the 2013 Newbery Committee, and also served on the 2002 Caldecott committee. You can reach him at sengelfried@yahoo.com.
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These insights are so fascinating! I know that every reader is different and it’s probably hard to be subjective, especially if you have a favorite read. FOr instance, I’ve read two books this year that I absolutely love but no one else seems to be drawn to them. How do you compartmentalize this process? I mean, how are you abel to read books with a critical eye without overlooking the joy of the experience itself? Are you allowed to talk with other committee members outside of the meetings, or is the reading process secret? Is it hard as an adult to feel like you’re judging books that children will gravitate toward, or do you feel that an adult’s viewpoint might not be the same as a child’s.
I hope that these questions make sense. Thank you. This was such an outstanding post!
Great questions, Meredith. When you’re on the committee, you don’t discuss the books with other members until the end of the year, except for a “practice discussion” in the summer at the ALA Conference. When you get to the discussion sessions in January, you may feel strongly about books that have few or no nominations from other members. Once a book is up for discussion, you usually find out pretty quickly if no others are supporting it…and you might just have to let it go. I still have a few titles that I regret didn’t do better, and wonder if I could have done a better job advocating for them. When I see them on the shelves, I silently apologize…
Reading “with a critical eye without overlooking the joy of the experience itself” is a challenge for sure. I try to kind of do both, but recognize when I’m doing one or the other. If I get caught up in a book, I still take notes, hoping that those will help me identify what the author has done to get me so involved.
And I do something similar with the fact that I’m an adult, judging books written for kids. I can’t ignore my reading experience as an adult…I really like kids’ books, and I read them as a grown-up, not as my 9 year-old-self. But then I also try to step back and, again, look at what the author has done to engage me, and try to understand how that would impact a child reader. It’s also tricky to look at books that I don’t really enjoy much as an adult, but that might be ones that I can see working really well with a child reader. I guess I try to use my experience as an adult reader to evaluate when it’s helpful, but also put that aside and evaluate with only the child reader in mind. I hope some of this rambling makes sense…
What percentage of your total reading in a Newbery year were books sent to you by publishers compared to books you had to seek out? Did publishers send technically eligible but not traditionally Newbery books (e.g., picture books, early readers, YA) or predominantly MG books they thought were contenders? Did most/all publishers get into the sending game or were there some holdouts? In the end what % of eligible books did you read and did that vary by genre? (I’ve expressed skepticism in the past, for example, that the Committee looks as widely at picture books as they do middle grade, even in years when a picture book is among the awardees.)
More great questions. As Emily noted, things have changed some since my Committee days (my last one was 10 years ago!), but back then, I would guess that I received maybe 80% of the books I looked at from publishers. We didn’t always get them right away, though, so I did get library copies before the publisher copies sometimes.
Some publishers were more selective than others in terms of picking likely Newbery contenders. I received lots of YA and Picture Books, and some Early Readers, but I’m sure fewer in those categories than the Printz, Caldecott, and Geisel committees must have received. I did feel that I needed to especially keep tabs on Picture Books, figuring there could be some gems out there that might not have been sent.
I’m pretty sure all of the major publishers sent us stuff, but don’t have a good recollection of what might have come from smaller publishers.
It’s so hard to say what % of eligible books I read. Partly because, as the year progressed, I would start, but not finish, more books. Once you have a good bunch of Newbery-level books done, it starts to become clearer, sooner, when a book is not at their level. So you stop before finishing, which doesn’t always feel great (though sometimes it does), but is the right trade off to get to more books.
Another piece of the read-as-many-eligible-books-as-you-can process is that there are fifteen people on the committee. So while I was reading all that I could, I knew that fourteen other people were doing the same, and that their reading processes and approach were not the same as mine. If I spent a little more time on non-fiction than others, for example (and I’m guessing I did), I could assume that someone else might be looking more closely at the borderline YA books that I might pass on. On my committees, we didn’t plan or coordinate that overlapping or lack of overlapping, but trusted that, given our different backgrounds and reading histories, we would, as a group, cover an awful lot of ground.
I don’t know how to figure out how many books the committees read as a whole, but some books would have been read by more people than others. There would be a pretty large group of nominations and suggestions that all 15 members read. Then a bunch of books that were read by, say, 8-14 members. And another bunch that maybe 4-7 members read. And a last group that only 1-3 members read. In the case of the books read by fewer members, we’d assume that they didn’t see enough in those books to merit suggestions (a suggestion would trigger everyone to read a book). Ideally, that should result in a very wide web…but I don’t know how to guess at what the total number is.
This is so interesting! I’ve never been on the Newbery committee, but I did do a reading committee in 2021 (YALSA’s Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers), and almost all of the books came physically still! There definitely were long supply chain/pandemic-related delays (and we did get maybe 20 ebooks), but we still got sent around 900 physical books. It totally makes sense that 2020 would have been different though.
I also love hearing how other people take their notes! My main trick for taking notes while reading, for Mock Newbery or anything else, is to put a post-it (the long lined kind if it’s a nominated book, regular size otherwise) inside the front cover and jot notes on that while I read. I find this makes it easier to read on the go and only worry about having the book and a pencil. Of course now I have hundreds of post-its with notes scribbled on them (it’s key to right the title first thing at the top, because otherwise you’ll immediately forget what book the notes were for), which I usually just stick in a binder/notebook afterwards. Not necessarily the most elegant solution, but it works well for me!
Steven, Thanks for the shout out to the members of the 2022 committee (I was one of them) for recognizing A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger. I didn’t realize it was published latest in the year compared to other awardees and honor winners!