Introducing the Reads Rainbow Book Awards 2022!

The Goodreads Choice Awards have come and gone and if, perchance, you thought to yourself huh, where are the Reads Rainbow Awards, well here will be your answer! This being the fourth year of the awards, we decided now is the time to break away from the tyranny of the Goodreads Choice Awards and timing ours alongside, and we’ll do it a different way. So, this is a post to explain just that!

Related: Reads Rainbow Awards 2019, 2020 & 2021.

How it’s going to work

Last year, we introduced a nominations round, meaning that all* of the books to be voted on were selected by you! That’s going to be the same this year, but we’re going to be a bit clearer about what allows nominations to pass into the final round too.

*We did have a few categories that didn’t meet our minimum threshold, so we did supplement a couple.

First things first: nominations will open on 21st December at 10AM GMT and will close on 4th January also at 10AM GMT. You may nominate any book featuring LGBT main characters (or, in the case of poetry and nonfiction, by authors who ID as LGBT) that has been first published in 2022. This means no reprints, and no books whose original publication date is not 2022, but have a new edition out in 2022, be this a different market, or with a new publisher. The sole exception to this is books originally written in other languages and first published in English in 2022. Any books which do not fulfil these criteria will be discarded from consideration.

The ten books with the most nominations in each category will form the final round. Voting for this will open on 11th January at 10AM GMT and close on 25th January at 10AM GMT. Results will be announced on 31st January.

All of this will take place on a separate site, the link for which can be found here. The site will go live at the time of nominations.

What you need to do

At the moment? Nothing! Nominations start next week, but if you’re super eager, you can get your nominations for all of the categories decided on now. You’ll be able to nominate one book per category, and we do ask that you fill in as many categories as you can. We also ask that you only submit one nominations form and one voting form, although this will be on a basis of trust.

If you want to think about what you might nominate, this year’s categories are below:

• Adult contemporary fiction
• Adult mystery/thriller
• Adult historical
• Adult horror
• Adult fantasy
• Adult science fiction
• YA contemporary fiction
• YA mystery/thriller
• YA historical
• YA horror
• YA fantasy
• YA science fiction
• Middle grade & picture books
• Graphic novels & comics
• Poetry
• Nonfiction

If you’re suddenly blanking on just what released this year (we know the feeling), then you can scroll through all our releases posts, conveniently sorted by almost every category here!

Any questions? Drop us a comment!