June & July 2012 GraveTells Book Awards: See our (and your) top picks!

Congratulations to our June & July Book Award winners!

Below are the books and authors who have been selected for our monthly book awards, by the reviewers and the readers.  Enjoy!

Book of the Month

Reviewer Top Picks

Readers Choice Awards

How do we choose the winners?

I’m sure you’re wondering how we make these decisions.  Here’s the skinny…

For Reviewer Top Pick (formerly Reviewer’s Choice), each GT reviewer that posted a review for the selection month gets a number of votes equalling their total reviews posted for that month.  They can spend those votes, in whatever split or block they want, on any book that earned a 4.0/5 or higher rating in its GT review.  The book(s) with a combination of the highest vote total and the highest number of reviewers who voted for it wins the honor and gets the nifty little silver ribbon on its book cover across our site.

For Book of the Month, the selection is a little more complicated and it is chosen solely by me.  As Executive Editor of the site, I take several factors into consideration, but most importantly, the book must have a minimum 4.5/5 rating and its review (if I haven’t personally read it) or story (if I have read it myself) needs to be memorable and have impact.  It’s largely based on “gut” feeling, so it’s hard to spell out the specific metric for you guys, but basically it’s an informed subjective decision that I make each month, and I don’t take that lightly.

Finally, the Readers Choice awards for Favorite Author and Favorite Story are chosen by you guys every month in our end-of-month public voting!  Thanks to everyone who participated this month and help spread the word to support your favorite authors and books!

Where can I get those cover badges for my site?

Want to display our awards on your site?  Whether you’re an author, publisher, fellow blogger, or enthusiastic reader, we’d be honored for you to share the GraveTells awards in your sidebar, post, or homepage!  Right-click the images above to save them locally and upload them to your own server, or you can link directly to them by right-clicking and selecting “copy image URL”.  If you need a specific type of image or more instructions, email me and I’d be happy to help!  =)