It’s The Best time of Year for Your Graphic Novel Collection Development

Click here for the full Eisner Awards ballot

The Eisner Awards will be announced tomorrow, but readers of this blog know that library workers don’t care as much about who wins as we do about how wonderful the full list of nominees is as one of our favorite resources. As a reminder, I refer you to one of my most popular topics: Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool.

Specifically the Eisner Awards are a slightly different tool because they honor both bound and single issues. Also because authors and artists get their own awards, we can use this list as a more comprehensive collection development tool than other awards lists.  I will explain in a moment, but first here is the link to the full list of this year’s nominees in over 30 categories across all age ranges.

Also before we go much further, I realize that some libraries don’t collect a lot of graphic novels, for adults, but these are the two most “book like" categories:

I would suggest that every library purchase at least these 10 titles; in fact most of you probably already have The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui since it made the ALA’s Notable Books List this year, and My Favorite Thing Is Monsters because it has already won many awards.

But in terms of using this list as a Collection Development tool and to use as we help readers, the Eisner ballot is one of a kind for a few reasons:

1. Although most libraries do not collection single issues, you can use the ballot to keep tabs on which newer series are gaining traction. If they are being nominated for awards in the single issue stage, chances are they will eventually get bound into library friendly editions. You can use the ballot to help let you know which comics are the ones you should be on the look out for in a year or so. With the number of comics out there, this helps cut through the noise a bit.
2. Artists and authors get nominated separately for their work. The fact that I can use the Eisner ballot to keep track of them separately has been invaluable in my own graphic novel RA and CD work [I have done a significant amount of both]. Why? Well, you can look at the ballots over time and see both established and up and coming artists and authors. Who is consistently being nominated for the award no matter who they are paired with. Even if you know nothing more than their names, you will be able to identify which new series are worth your attention based on those names. I even kept a database of the artists and authors that both got nominations and resonated with my patrons. This meant, for example, that years before Brian K. Vaughan was a household name, I was aware that he was writing great stories that my patrons enjoyed, and anytime I saw he had a new series, I automatically bought it. 
3. I still hear of libraries, even in 2018, that do not collect graphic novels for children. The Eisner Awards have categories based on age groups, so if you are trying to advocate for adding this format at a youth age level, you have years of nominees to help you justify titles to add to a collection.
4. All the other reasons any awards ballot is a good resource, especially for displays.

You can click here after the awards ceremony to see who wins, but as you can see from this post, the are all winners to us because the list of nominees is a treasure trove of information for us.