This year was my first year helping to select the Inky Awards judges. I did not expect the decisions to be so hard! It’s one thing to get tonnes of applications (which we did), a whole ‘nother kettle of fish to get tonnes of amazing applications (which we also did).

In the end, we ended up having to say no to a lot of people who we thought would make excellent Inky Award judges. It hurt our hearts. If you were unsuccessful this time around, first of all, I’d like to say that many of our Inky judges apply several times before they are successful, and in this way, getting knocked back is a pretty normal part of life, and not something to beat yourself up over at all.

The second thing I’d like to say is, there is some general advice we at the Centre for Youth Literature felt would be beneficial for all applicants, in order to strengthen your chances should you choose to apply again next year. Here is our advice:

1. The ‘Why do you love to read?’ question

Many of our applications opened with a sentence similar to ‘I have loved books since I was a baby/since my parents read them to me.’ While this is of course very true for many of us who love books, it also unfortunately doesn’t make your application stand out. Even though it seems like a pretty simple question, it’s an opportunity for you to be inventive and imaginative in your response. Applications that really impressed us used this question to show not only did they love books, they also understood why they loved books. Some of our successful applicants also took this an opportunity to talk about what they thought books did for the world and for other people – and we really liked that!

2. The ‘Why would you make a great Inky Awards judge?’ question

This was a question where we were looking for people who had really considered what it meant to be an Inky Awards judge. People who showed they had thought beyond all the reading an Inky judge has to do, and onto some other much-needed Inky judge qualities. Great applications talked about how they handled opinions different to their own (something all Inky judges come up against during shortlist selection), while others talked about what they did in their lives already to champion YA books and support the YA community. Applications like this showed us that if selected, we were placing the Inky Awards into the hands of someone who knew exactly what the task would entail, and that they had the love and the passion for all things YA to do it.

3. MOST IMPORTANTLY… personality over perfection!

Far and away, the thing that always impresses us the most is… YOU. The best applications were the ones that made the personality behind it shine. We loved applications where we just really got a good sense of who we would be entrusting with an Inky judgeship – that crazed, bookish fiend in all their glorious geekery.  A good Inky Awards judge application doesn’t need to have the most whizz-bang-special-effects-galore-the-page-actually-comes-alive-and-serenades-you, nor does it need perfect grammar, or an adult to write it, or for a parent to go through it with a fine-toothed comb for any spelling mistakes. It just needs to tell us what makes you, you.