How the Quills Awards work

The Quills Literacy Foundation, headed by chairman Gerry Byrne, invited 6,000 booksellers, book-buyers, and librarians on the Publishers Weekly subscriber list to nominate five books each in 19 book categories. Besides fiction and nonfiction, categories include science fiction/fantasy/horror, mystery/suspense/thriller, graphic novel, romance, religion/spirituality, health/self-improvement, and several others.

No write-ins are allowed. Nominees must meet one of several criteria:

A starred advance review in Publishers Weekly magazine (a star means the editors believe the book has special interest or merit), or be listed on:

The Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers list,

The Borders Original Voices list,

The BookSense Pick list (monthly recommendations by the American Booksellers Association, the organization of independent booksellers),

Or at least one of the bestseller lists of Barnes & Noble, Publishers Weekly, Borders, or BookSense.

The 95-book nominee list, compiled in the spring, has big names such as Philip Roth, J.K. Rowling, Deepak Chopra, Walter Mosley, Elizabeth Kostova, and David McCullough, as well as a lot of new faces. Readers can check the nominee list and vote online on the Quills website (quillsliteracy.org) or in Borders stores, through Sept. 15.