Big Changes for the Whitney Awards

After gathering feedback after the 2007 Whitney Awards, the Whitney Committee has been working to make a few tweaks and adjustments. You can view all the changes at whitneyawards.com, but here are a few of the highlights:

• The category "General Fiction" has been added.


• The category "Romance/Women's Fiction" is now "Romance".


• The category "YA/Children's Lit" is now "Youth Fiction", and will be focusing just on YA and Middle-Grade, not children's books. (The required word count is 20,000 words.)


• There are now small panels of judges dedicated to individual genre categories, rather than a single committee that judges all the books. (The Whitney Committee, however, will continue to judge the two overall categories, Best Novel of the Year and Best Novel by a New Author.)


• The Whitneys now have more autonomy from the LDStorymakers organization. While the president is still chosen by, and reports to, the Storymakers Executive Committee, the Whitney Committee operates independently in all other respects.


• Instead of just allowing LDStorymakers to vote in the Whitney Academy, now almost all LDS authors are eligible.

There are more changes. Go to the website and check it out. And remember: nominate your favorite novels!