Over the summer, The Ripped Bodice announced it was launching an award contest for excellence in romance fiction. There wasn’t a formal submission process and the award relied on a well-informed panel of judges to select the winning books. Winners will received a $1000 cash prize, as well as a $100 donation to a charity of their choice.
Now let’s celebrate the winners of the inaugural contest, nicknamed the RIBBIES:
- Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert
- The Austen Playbook by Lucy Parker
- Once Ghosted, Twice Shy by Alyssa Cole
- Xeni by Rebekah Weatherspoon
- A Prince on Paper by Alyssa Cole
- An Unconditional Freedom by Alyssa Cole
- American Love Story by Adriana Herrera
- Trashed by Mia Hopkins
- Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan
We have reviewed a majority of the titles and the links above will either take you to our review or the book’s listing in the database.
Congratulations to all the winners and the hardworking judging staff!
Thanks to your website reviews, listing ebook sales, and listening to the Smart Bitches podcasts, I have a number of these titles already read or in my TBR pile. I’ve just marked the two I don’t have for my wishlist. Thanks Smart Bitches, and Ripped Bodice for bringing a variety of great romance titles to our attention day after day. My husband was diagnosed with cancer last year and I need some HEAs in my life. Thanks for providing access to the many diverse titles in this genre.
One author has three separate books nominated? That seems a little superfluous to me. There weren’t two other authors out of the million who published this year who deserved the nomination?
Alyssa Cole is just that good.
She did publish all three of these books in 2019 and the contest rules are online for anyone interested.
A fine selection!
Both of the books I have read are 5 stars, which gives the awards credibility for me.
I also don’t understand why there are three books by Alyssa Cole . . . Especially when there are eligible books like The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics out there.
Congrats to the winners, the ones I’ve read have been excellent. Since RWA and RT awards are gone now it would be great if this could become the big award for romance authors.
I do have questions about this process/award. Why are there 1-12 possible winners – what determines how many each year – and what happened to the excess prize money that was budgeted? There really aren’t 3 other books worthy in 2019? Or 5 other authors whose skill should be recognized?
Also the rules say that they need to be romance novels – that should be defined because two of the winners are definitely novella length.
I’ve been to the bookstore in Culver City several times and wasn’t very impressed. Mostly because of indifferent customer service, twice the same woman acted like she was doing me a favor just speaking to me and the other times the women seemed like I was interrupting them. So though the books on their list are diverse and I;ve enjoyed several I just don’t have that good of an opinion of the crew at The Ripped Bodice.
@Nerdalisque – Olivia Waite was one of the judges, so I imagine she took herself out of the running.
Just wanted to put in a good word for the Ripped Bodice. I have been there a dozen times over the past few years, and the staff have always greeted me with a smile and have been very helpful. The store is a gem, as are the awesome folks who work there!
Congratulations!
Although she’s not a fave author (I’ve liked some of her books, have DNF’d others), I do have to echo others’ comments about one author winning 3 times for 3 different books.
At best, it feels excessive while at worst, it feels rather unfair/unbalanced. I’m hoping that the Ripped Bodice will revise the rules for next year’s awards so that there won’t be one author having so many awards.
Aside from that bit of wonkiness, I do think that the chosen books were good ones. I deffo enjoyed several of them.
My first reaction was “Oh, the winners are so diverse! It would be awesome if this replaced the RITAs!” But on a closer look, even looking at the online rules, I’m not really sure how to interpret this. I still love how diverse the winning books are, but the absence of award categories or clear criteria/definitions or other nominees or winners from several sub-genres makes this seem more like a list of favourites than professional awards, especially with one author winning three times. And… I mean, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that! But if they were to decide they wanted to try to supplant the RITAs in this new post-RWA-legitimacy world, they’d need to change the contest vibe substantially, because this is too ad hoc to be industry standard awards.
If there had been clear categories, and Alyssa Cole had won three of them, that would have looked very different; Cole is incredibly talented, and her winning books are quite plausibly from three different categories.
The lack of Latinx authors honored here aside from Herrera is extremely disappointing especially in light of the American Dirt controversy.
All right, I’m no industry expert here but I have Feelings (TM) on this. Buckle in, here we go…
@Star said it really well above. “if they were to decide they wanted to try to supplant the RITAs in this new post-RWA-legitimacy world”. Probably the organizers had no such intentions when the contest was conceived, back in 2019, pre-shitshow. But now there is a vacuum and their choices have new weight. Kind of like when something happens to the Heir and the younger sibling is suddenly burdened with responsibility they weren’t prepared for.
I don’t know much about the Ripped Bodice, I didn’t read much romance up until last year when I was blessed with discovering SBTB. But I’ve seen this kind of controversy go down in SFF awards, like the Hugos. And every time it happens, I as a reader am left with a bad taste in my mouth, figuratively speaking. Can we just let people enjoy things…
This was their first attempt, and I want to believe intentions were good. Yes there is room for improvement, no you can’t make everyone a happy winner. I like the diversity, the egalitarian nature of the awards (no Best this or that, just Some of our Favorites that deserve recognition), I like that some of those favorites are my favorites as well. A step in the right direction, hopefully to be built upon, adding more steps, by more people. Start your own local awards if that’s your jam. The more the merrier. As they say in improv, start with “Yes, and…” instead of “But what about…”
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.