Background

I asked a population of geeks for their nominations for their favourite Novels/Stories.

Originally I had a twist for this contest in letting people nominate only a single entry to keep quality high and stop the contest from being too huge. In the end 82 books were nominated in this way and it made for an interesting start. But I wanted a broader contest so I opened up the nominating and in the end 371 books entered the contest.
Four of those 82 'single nomination' books made it into the Final where five books competed.

The contest was primarly conducted based on average ratings, but in addition books needed a (gradually increasing) minimum number of ratings to progress from round to round to keep the results relevant to the geek jurors.

I didn't go just for novels because I also wanted to cover novellas/short stories/linked short stories/graphic novels if people wanted to nominate them. As a group we also made a collective decision to exclude religious books to avoid the discussion being derailed by whether they were a story or not.