Upcoming Changes to Nominations and Polls

[Sarah]

Announcements
We won't have nominations next month since the next round of votes will be a runner-up poll. Any second place book that has received 30+ votes will be in the poll so feel free to dig through the 2016 polls and decide what you're going to vote for :)

Kim and I have decided to make a couple of changes that we believe will be quite exciting for the group. These changes will take effect during the Feb 2017 polls.

1. Each poll will contain five nominations instead of seven. The reason for this is that those stragglers at the bottom aren't an efficient use of votes. We feel that if we bring it down to five per poll, it will push those votes upstream and that this change will create more enthusiasm with both nominations and polls.

2. We will also be resuming the random polls in February. For those who haven't participated in these before, what we do is have themed nominations in alternating genres in each month with the other poll being five choices selected by a moderator for the random polls. For February we'll have a Sci-Fi Theme and a Fantasy Random Poll. March will be Random Sci-Fi and a Fantasy Theme.

I would like to encourage people to visit the Give us your themes! thread if you have ideas for nomination themes. I hope everyone is as excited as we are about these new and old alterations. I'm excited to be returning to the group's tradition of random polls and I look forward to seeing how voting plays out when we have five books per poll.