March Madness used to only refer to the NCAA basketball tournament but over the years it has spread into everything else. The book world was fairly early to jump on the March Madness marketing phenomenon by creating rankings, brackets, and competition of stories.
Today, I am going to offer you 3 examples. Each of which is fun to share with our readers with links, social media posts, displays, and maybe even a little tourney of your own. But they also make for an awesome resource of "sure bet" reads.
Oh, and of course since this is Becky's blog, all have a solid backlist.
Let's begin with undisputed #1 seed of all book tournaments-- The Morning New's Tournament of Books. I have written about this event as a resource. Not only is the ToB fun, I argue all of the time, that their expanded definition of "literary fiction," of what is the overall best, has helped to expand the entire literary world's version of literary fiction. It is one of my favorite sure bet resources for our most avid readers. Click here to read my detailed discussions of ToB over the years.
ToB Backlist: Not only does the event go back to 2005, but on the main page for the ToB, you can see a "Wall of Champions," featuring each winner with a link to that year's competition, meaning you get access to all of the books included in that year's competition.
The ToB is adult book focused, but teens also love March Madness. There are many options and in fact, teen based tourney's are more common at local libraries than adult ones. Today, I offer a longstanding, local (to me), YA tournament of Books: The Illinois Library Associations Young Adult Services Forum's 2025 Tournament of Books. Just like The Morning News, the ILA YASF Tournament of Books can be used as a resource for displays, collection development, and online content. It is also a great way to assess trends in Teen fiction. These are the most popular books of the last year as determined by YA library workers; therefore, they show what teens want to read the most. Trends are important so that we can craft lists and add more titles to our collections, but even more important, trends in teen become trends in adult. As the readers age, they bring their tastes with them and those tastes become adult trends. Recent examples are Romantasy and (further back) Psychological Suspense.
ILA YASF Backlist: Right at the top of the page is a list of the links to find the pervious tournaments going back to 2014. But please note, YA tends to age faster than adult, so I would use the links from 2020 forward to help readers and see how trends have emerged, matured, and start to fade away.
And then there are wildcard tourneys-- book centered March Madness about something more specific. This year's example is AWESOME as LitHub is doing a bracket tournament of The Best Villains in Literature. This one is elaborate. First the four divisions are: Authority Figures, Monsters & Boogeymen, Manipulative Bastards, Anti-Villain.
Then, within the divisions, each villain was given a ranking and then paired up just like the NCAA tournament. There is an essay about each villain, why they are evil and then anyone can vote. Currently there are on Round 2. But here is the link to see how the votes shook out in Round 1.
What is so fun about this tournament is that villains are the catalyst for our protagonists, therefore the very best make our favorite books better and their villainy stays with us. Also, once we get a winner out of each "region," I am actually more interested in which type of villain wins.
Since this tournament is voted on by actual readers, there is so much we can learn about what readers enjoy most in their stories just by standing by and watching this competition unfold.
And in terms of using this as a resource, each villain's entry ends with links from LitHub where this villain previously came up.
Can you tell, I just LOVE this?
If you want her hear more about how LitHub created this tournament, listen to this episode of the LitHub Podcast (it's the final story).
Best Villains Backlist?: Yes this is the inaugural tournament BUT all of the villains are from book we know. By definition this is a backlist tournament, which is refreshing as the other two are all focused on 2024 books.
I hope you have fun perusing all of these brackets and get a chance to vote for your favorite villain.
I know there are many more. Feel free to add your favorite March Madness Book Brackets to the comments.
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