At my library each year, we hold a variety of mock award committee discussions, and I’ve participated on our Mock Printz committee for the past two years. Our rules are a mixture of Real Printz rules and our own. Eligibility and criteria are the same. During the year, those of us on the committee nominate books ourselves and we read as many of them as possible. From those books, we choose a shortlist of up to ten titles which we discuss at an official training session open to all staff at the library in January, just before the youth media awards are announced at midwinter.

Since those who choose to attend the training haven’t been reading all the books along with the committee members throughout the year, they need to get the shortlist in time to read all the books on it by the training. All participants in the training must have read all ten titles. That means we have the shortlist available by October or November, which also means we necessarily miss out on discussing some titles with October, November, or December publication dates that could very well win the Real Printz.

At the final discussion itself, we briefly introduce each title and discuss it critically for ten minutes. After we’ve discussed each book, we proceed to voting just like the Real Printz committee does, with paper ballots and a point system of five points for a first place vote, three points for a second place vote, and one point for a third place vote.

This year, our shortlist consisted of the following ten titles:

And from this shortlist, a clear winner emerged:

Selecting our honor books was a bit more difficult. After much discussion, we settled on the following four titles:

It was a really valuable experience and I’m already excited to start reading for the 2019 Mock Printz! Do your libraries do mock award committees? What books did you select as your winners this year?