For those of you who followed the Readers’ Choice Awards at about.com, the official results are in. Actually, when the voting ending on March 8, the winning nominee in the special needs memoir category was obvious. But about.com’s contest rules require a week to verify the results before announcing the winner. Then it took me a week to write the post, so two weeks late, the winner is…My Baby Rides the Short Bus.
Ahhh shucks, you might be saying. I was hoping the winner would be A Different Dream for My Child. Well, so was I. But Different Dream came in at third place out of five, which was a very satisfying finish. Especially behind My Baby Rides the Short Bus and the first runner up, The Braided Cord. Both are excellent books, as are the fourth and fifth place nominees Gravity Pulls You In and Shuyler’s Monster.
In a way, I feel as though A Different Dream won the Miss Congeniality competition, which was always my favorite part of the Miss America competition each year. I always identified with those gals. They were so darn spunky!
The real winner in the special needs memoir category (and the other three special needs categories at about.com) are the parents, kids and professionals in the special needs community. Why? Because the visibility of the 20 finalists (5 in each of the 4 categories = 20, for those of you wondering about the math) has been raised significantly.
Which has already led to more traffic at the nominated blogs and mores sales for the nominated books.
Which means more parents looking for support are finding it.?Which means they don’t feel so isolated or alone.?Which is why the blogs were created and the books were written in the first place.
The person who made all this happen is Terri Mauro at about.com. She advocated for the inclusion of special needs categories in the Readers’ Choice Awards, and she did all the organizing, posting, counting, and such. So thank you, Terri, for all your hard work. You can thank Terri yourself, check out the Readers’ Choice Awards, finalists, and nominees in all categories at www.about.com
If you want to make A Different Dream for My Child more visible, please consider writing a review of the book at about.com. Just go to the finalists page and scroll down to the link for A Different Dream for My Child. Then click on “tell us why you like it” to get to the electronic review form. Your reviews mean a great deal to me personally. But more importantly, they make a big difference in whether or not potential readers buy the book.
