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Who Can Judge the Heart Awards?
***JUDGING SIGNUPS FOR 2025 HEART AWARDS IS OPEN***
How would you like to take part in determining the 2025 Heart Awards Winners and Finalists? We would love to have you participate in judging our contest.
You will receive FREE PDF e-books.
Read the stories, complete a short score sheet, then watch to see if your favorites win!
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GO here to submit your Judge application: TO JUDGE
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Q. Who can judge the HEART AWARDS?
A. Any romance reader(for the published categories) and any industry professional(for unpublished categories) with a computer or e-reader who can read .pdf files. We do request that anyone under the age of 18 restrict their judging request to the Young Adult Category. If you are entered in the Heart Awards, you can still judge, just so long as it’s not the category you entered.
Note: Authors, please invite your readers to sign up to judge and share the link to this page in your newsletter and on your socials.
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Q. What kind of books will I be judging?
A. You will be assigned to 1, or more if you signed up to judge multiple categories, of the 3 categories you listed in your judge application. If those categories have already been filled, then we will contact you with a selection of the categories that still need judges. There are 21 categories total. If you are a reader only and NOT an industry professional, will only be given judge assignments for categories 1-7.5 as those are the published categories that we want readers judges for. Those who mark that they are industry professionals will be assigned to the unpublished categories first as those are not published and could best benefit from your expertise. Find the category descriptions HERE. Novellas are books with a word count of 15,000 to 49,999 words. Full novels have 50K or more words.
You will be reading books from all sub-genres of romance that contain that specific heat level of sexual content. Example: If you chose to judge the Scorcher category, you could receive contemporary romance, romantic suspense, and paranormal romance that all contains scorcher heart level of sexual content.
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Q. How many entries will I have to judge?
A. Each novel category judge will be responsible for reading FOUR or FIVE entries and scoring/rating them. (If you are willing to judge more, please indicate that on the form)
Each novella & unpublished category judge will receive more than 5 entries due to the short nature of their category, though the amount will depend on their category.
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Q. How do I judge?
A. You will read each entry and score it based on a simple scoring system.
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Q. How do I receive entries?
A. If you are chosen to judge, you will receive an email with instructions and the link to a Google share file for each of your entries. Or we will attach them to the email.
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Q. This sounds like fun. How long do I have to read and judge?
A. You’ll receive your books February 5th and you will have until May 15 to submit the scores to your category coordinator.
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Q. Do I have to do anything else?
A. No. Just read and score the entries.
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Q. Great. How do I sign up?
A. Easy…
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TO JUDGE THE Heart Awards:
1. Pick your favorite categories.
2. Go to the Judge Application Page by clicking HERE