DABWAHA Champion Is Iron Kissed

Iron KissedA whisper thin margin of 12 votes separated the winner, Iron Kissed, from the runner up, The Spymaster’s Lady. An equally tiny margin separated the first place winner, CarolynJean, from Jennifer Y’s entry.  Jennifer Y had maintained the top spot for nearly the entire tournament only to lose out at the very end. (She had picked The Spymaster’s Lady as champion and Carolyn Jean, Iron Kissed).

We are excited to announce that both CarolyJean and Jennifer Y will receive a Sony Reader.  Jennifer Y had racked up a number of prizes during the tournament and we offered her a Sony Reader in lieu of the various prizes.

CarolynJean will receive the title of Chief Bracketologist, a Sony Reader (red, natch), and $100 Gift Certificate from Fictionwise.  JenniferY will have to console herself with just a SonyReader.  Angela James was the first round winner of a $15 GC to Barnes and Noble.

jiffybug won the prize for having the absolute worst bracket. She only picked 13 matches correctly Author Maya Banks offered up a great prize to the last place bracketeer: $50 GC to online bookstore, Godiva chocolate basket, and ARCS of Sweet Persuasion (June 09) and Sweet Seduction (Oct 09).

sidebarlogoWe opened a second chance tournament at the Sweet Sixteen and the winner of the 2nd Chance Tourney and an iTouch is Christine.  Congratulations!

The Spymaster’s Lady was picked most times by entrants to win the Championship with Iron Kissed the 5th most popular book picked to prevail in the end.

We are excited to announce that Big Ups, an awesome Feather Pen, a door hanger indicating that you are a writer and should not be bothered, and a Sony Reader will be sent to Patricia Briggs.  We asked if she had anything to say regarding her epic win:

Wow!  In the words of Jim Carey in The Mask—“You Really love me!”  How cool is that.  I’m not sure the best book won . . . I really loved The Spymaster’s Lady —but I’m thrilled to pieces. 
Thank you 🙂

Woot!  We had 731 entrants in total which was a 100% increase over last years’ number. Sarah beat the pants off of Jane with a final placement of 326 compared to Jane’s wimpy 340 placement.  All the standings can be seen here.  We had some great sponsors:

  • Harlequin set up this awesome page for the Harlequin books at 30% that made it into the DA BWAHA tournament.  BooksonBoard donated one of the Sony Reader prizes.  Fictionwise and Samhain gave us wonderful gift certificates.

Despite our mishaps – entries that didn’t get inputted, the polls not opening on time or closing too early, it was great fun.  We’ve learned alot this year and we are already planning on making the DABWAHA tourney better next year.  We asked Patricia Briggs and Joanna Bourne how to make the contest better and we would like to hear from you as well.  While the contest is fresh in your minds, please give us your thoughts and recommendations. Thank you all for participating.  It would be no fun if it weren’t for the entrants, voters, and everyone who supported DABWAHA.I

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General Bitching...

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  1. Krista says:

    Congrats to all the winners! I had my eyes on the booby prize, but I will have to console myself with only the fun of playing…sniff

    My suggestion for next year would be to have a consistent voting time in the evenings. I missed all the polls that happened between 6 am and 6pm because my school board employer saw fit to block the Bitches with a firewall. It seems they don’t want children reading about man titty and schlongs. Who knew?

  2. MaryKate says:

    Woohoo! Congrats CJ and Christine! I’ll have to go and see how badly I ended up doing. I can take comfort from the idea that at least my Tarheels won last night.

  3. Kwana says:

    Big congrats to the winners. This contest was so much fun. I had the best time voting and following along. I no nothing about college basketball and this gave me something to do. Thanks so much to the organizers and the sponsors.

  4. KCfla says:

    Congrats to all the winners! I loved playing, even though I was stuck perpetually in the middle of the pack.

    And I have to agree with Krista about the voting times. Some of us don’t have unlimited/any internet access at work, and as such we can’t vote on the polls during the day. ( Think 8am through about 6 pm.) I did, but only because I could sneak into the ladies room with my IPhone. ( and if anyone tells my bosses I’m so screwed!)

    I realize that this is set up to mirror the b-ball championships, but could the first & possibly second rounds be started earlier ( day-wise)? Or perhaps only 2 polls per day. One starting early enough to vote Before work, and one lasting until after?

    All things concidered though- a totally fun time!

  5. Carolyn Jean says:

    I just wanted to come over here and thank you for this contest! I already said this over at DA, but this was tons of fun, and I am just so grateful to have won these prizes!! 

    And from somebody who knows just enough HTML to wreck websites, even though I know there were glitches, it was a total technological wonder how smoothly the voting went—you worked really hard on this thing! 

    Also, I’m super relieved JenniferY is getting a reader, too! Because she’s my new BWAHAfrenefoe and blog buddy from this contest.
    Anyway, Thanks SO much!!!!

  6. rebyj says:

    Congrats Carolyn Jean ,JenniferY, Patricia Briggs and all the other winners!

    Thanks Sarah and Jane for hosting the tournament.  Since it entertained me for a few weeks it was totally worth all the work you put into it! lol

    I think all the twitter trash talking made it all the more fun this year.

  7. theo says:

    Congrats to the winners! 🙂

    I had a blast with this. My first ever bracket for *anything* and my first weeks on twitter. Though I was in the middle of the pack, I enjoyed playing 🙂

    Suggestion? There were a few books I hadn’t read. Maybe give a heads up a bit sooner on what books will be competing?

  8. I had such a great time in this contest.
    (No fingernails left, though.)
    Thanks to Dear Author and Smart Bitches for all the work you did putting this DABWAHA together and making it kick ass. 

    Spymaster’s Lady went down fighting against just a hellaciously good book.  Congratulations to Patricia Briggs.

  9. Carin says:

    This was my first DABWAHA (or DaBwahahahahaha, as I liked to call it) and I LOVED it!

    I have no idea how difficult or easy things are to set up, so I think I’ll just ask for what I want, even if it’s impossible.

    1.)  Let’s have cover art next to the name of the book in the bracket layout itself.  Filling out my bracket was an exercise in managing multiple windows as I flipped back and forth to see covers and try to remember which ones I’d read and hadn’t, and what they were about.  Props to you for the links to the authors’ sites with descriptions – I liked that a lot. 

    2.) How about a search function on the standings so I can find out how bad I’m doing without reading EVERY name on the page.  It went better once I started looking from the bottom, but it was still a bit of a pain.

    3.)  I agree with others about the voting timing.  http://www.gofugyourself.com has been running a fugly fashion tournament very similar to DaBwahahahaha.  However, they don’t match their voting to the game schedule (other than starting and finishing at the same time) and I didn’t feel like that took anything away from the overall feel of things.  (by the way, I don’t think they have an online bracket contest or anything, which just goes to show how much you bitches rock!)

    4.) One more thing, another idea from the fug tournament.  “Region 1” “Region 2”  Such boring names.  In the fug tournament the brackets are named after outstanding examples of Fug.  (There’s a Madonna Bracket, Cher Bracket, Charo, etc)  I’m SURE you guys can create some awesomely creative bracket titles. 

    This was SO enjoyable!  Thank you so much for doing all the extra work to put it together and find sponsors and awesome prizes.  You ROCK!

  10. JenniferY says:

    Thanks so much!  And congrats to Carolyn Jean, Angela, and jiffybug!

    And if I had to lose the championship I was glad it was to Carolyn Jean because as she said we are now BWAHAfrenefoes and blog buddies from this contest.

    I also discovered a lot of a great books through this that I somehow missed last year.

    As I said over on DA, my one suggestion would be posting the voting scheduled ahead of time.

  11. Hilcia says:

    Congratulations to Carolyn Jean, Jennifer Y, Patricia Briggs, Joanna Bourne, Angela and jiffybug!  This was such fun.  Thank you DA and SB for all the work you put into this.

  12. JoanneL says:

    Thanks so much for all the hard work that went into this tournament and all the great prizes from some Super Sponsors!

    And yea jiffybug!  Maya Banks put some lovin on ya’!

  13. AmandaG says:

    I remember hearing about this last year but for whatever reason didn’t join in.  I wish I had!  This was fun.

    My only suggestion was one that someone already mentioned about being able to search for your name to figure out where you are in the standings. 

    Seeing the list of contestants and all the information you had on that page made me think you all put a lot of hard work in to getting everything just so.  Thanks for the fun.  Maybe next year I’ll join in the trash talking.

  14. rebyj says:

    My only suggestion was one that someone already mentioned about being able to search for your name to figure out where you are in the standings.

    I use the old school “CTRL F” to open a txt search box. It works.

  15. Lori says:

    Congratulations to the winners!

    I don’t have much to say about improving things. My only real problem was that I suck at picking the winners. I do think that the layout of the second chance bracket, where you ended up picking one of two books in the middle of the form, was a bit odd & confusing. Aside from that I didn’t have any major issues.

    For the people wanting a search function—-The find function on the browser doesn’t work well in all websites, but I found that for DABWAHA it worked fine.  Just hit Control F & it opens a little window thingy at the bottom of the screen.  Type your screen name in the box and hit Next. This allowed me to see that I was fairly consistently the lowest ranked person with “Lori” in her screen name. Good to know 🙂

  16. JBHunt says:

    I think this was mentioned on the DA site—matching books up for the first round WITHIN categories before unleashing the free for all.  That way the best in the different categories all advance to the next round.  I think that’s a great idea.

    Also, did anyone pick up on an undercurrent of campaigning—not by the authors but on their behalf?  Well, it is a competition, so I guess that’s to be expected.  Still, I like the idea of the lone reader—on the foul line, metaphorically or literally weighing the books in both hands before voting—unswayed by the crowd in the stands.

  17. SonomaLass says:

    @rebyj:  me too.  Most browsers have it; no real need for a special function, IMO.

    I disagree about having the books in the separate categories square off first—I like to see this mimic the basketball tournament as much as possible, where teams from different conferences are seeded all over the map, on purpose.  I’d like to see even more mixing up, based on a seeding system.  Not sure how you picked the seeds, but I’d suggest either doing it by sales figures (if you could get them easily) or by tracking how many nom-nom-nominations each book got when you asked for reader input, or by ratings the books received from DA & SBTB reviewers, or (in NCAA tradition) a Byzantine combination of all of these.

    If it’s not too much work to keep track of our input, I’d also suggest inviting people to make nom-inations any time, and perhaps remind us every couple of months that nominations are open.  I know that there were several things I read and enjoyed that I didn’t think to nominate.  I’ve started a list for next year already!

    Voting times are tricky, since there are Bitches in every time zone.  I missed a couple of votes, I know.  To keep them on the same day as the b-ball, but keep them open longer for easier access, you might need to have more matches up at the same time.  But then again, as long as you mix the times around, it’s equally fair/unfair on everybody.  Longer voting slots would mean even more impact from campaigners, too.

  18. Krista says:

    Honestly, I didn’t even realize the tourney was linked to basketball. Us Canucks don’t hold much truck with the sport (at least in my part of the world).  That explains the weird days for voting. I couldn’t figure out why they were all over the map. Duh.

  19. Trix says:

    Regarding poll times, I’d suggest 21-24 hours for them to be open, even if you do need to have more matches running in parallel. The US times are really inconvenient for us antipodeans who work normal hours. 9am New York time is 11pm in Sydney (and 1am in NZ). Since I don’t do any computery stuff before going to work in the morning, I have no real chance of getting in to vote in most of the rounds. 

    And count me in as another one who had no clue that it had something to do with basketball leagues or whatever!

  20. Carin says:

    I use the old school “CTRL F” to open a txt search box. It works.

    I had no idea!  I can think of so many times I will try this.  Thanks!

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