Project Top 100

It was the best of times (10/1 -- yay ballots!); it was the worst of times (10/31 – more ballots?!). Yes, October 2007 will go down as one busy month for the three pollsters.

If you don’t know, we three have been running minipolls for over a year now, but no minipoll could compare to the Top 100 Romances Poll.

In September, LinnieGayl helpfully prepared an Excel document with about 400 titles based on past Top 100 lists. At the end of the voting period, the number of titles on Lee’s spreadsheet had increased to over 2600 titles that received at least one vote, and by the time we combined all three spreadsheets, to nearly 5000 titles!

We decided that we would divide the alphabet and tally ballots by email address. That worked well for A-I and J-R votes, but S-W wasn’t as popular a grouping as the other letters (who knew?). So by mid-month, we switched letter groups. Again, S-W proved to be the least popular grouping so we would all help each other tally the others’ ballots. We would email each other several times a day to check and see if anyone else needed help.

We all had our own system for recording votes. Lee would copy her ballots to Word, renumber them 100-1 (the #1 book received 100 points), and then record her votes. As the month went on, she refined her system even more, grouping authors’ books together so she could simply proceed down her chart and plug in the specific number. This worked well for authors/titles already on the chart, but there were SO many additional books and titles that were constantly being added. At times, Lee would have to check an author’s website to verify specific titles (let's see – Christine Feehan had 14 “Dark” titles which received votes, Jane Feather had 7 “V” books and Mary Balogh had 5 “Slightly” titles).

Cindy forgot LinnieGayl had created a spreadsheet and started from scratch with the first ballot - just copying and pasting the list into Word, making sure the titles were the first listed and then pasted them into Excel. Every 10 ballots or so she would then arrange everything alphabetically and go through and move the scores to one line and delete multiple rows. It was 5 days before the polls closed that she clued in to the original spreadsheet. Uh-oh.

LinnieGayl needed the authors in a separate column (she was going to use a statistical program that would merge all identical data – remember “identical” because that becomes very important later) and Cindy had the titles and authors all in one column. Even though Cindy had known authors would need their own columns, she figured she really only needed to list the first 150 authors’ names in a different column. Oops. For two days she typed 2634 authors’ names into separate columns - and it hurt.

All three pollsters read a lot of romance books, but even they were surprised at some of the authors and titles that received votes – sometimes because they never heard of them and other times because “I didn't know [insert title] was a romance.”

Lee was a little bit surprised to see votes for:

V.C. Andrews' “My Sweet Audrina” and “Petals in the Wind”
Gillian Bradshaw “Render Unto Caesar”
Robert A. Heinlein's “Double Star”
Andre Norton's “Griffin in Glory,” “Songsmith,” “The Crystal Griffin” and “The Jargon Pard”

Head scratchers for Cindy and LinnieGayl were Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” and Colleen McCullough’s “The Thorn Birds” - Cindy was forced to ask after the 4th ballot came in with this title if the book ended differently than the movie. Apparently not.

But no matter if they were romance books or not, they made the spreadsheet.

We managed to keep up with data entry through MOST of the month. That is, until the last few days of voting, when everyone who had been holding onto their ballots came out in full force. We were so flooded with ballots in those last few days, that it took us another three days or so to do the remaining data entry. Then, the fun truly began, matching three separate spreadsheets.

Fortunately, LinnieGayl uses a statistical software package on a routine basis that is designed to handle just such matches . . . that is, if everything (last name author, first name author, exact title) is the same. Needless to say, with three different people doing data entry, and many, many different voters listing the same titles, there are many different ways to enter the same title. So, what for one voter was, “The Devil in Winter” was for another voter “Devil in Winter” while for yet another it was “A Devil in Winter.” Not wanting any vote to be lost, LinnieGayl spent two days doing the match, to make certain that everything worked out.

Preparing the Write Up & Analysis

We all would like to thank Rachel of AAR for inspiring us to post the covers of the books that made the Top 100. We were like wiggly puppies all excited about the “look” and had no clue just how much work that was going to be. Three days into creating the chart someone made a suggestion that maybe it wasn’t necessary to do so. But, oh, it was necessary! No way we were going to be defeated by a little *cough* HTML.

Lee and LinnieGayl can do observations right off the top of their head. Lee is always coming up with things before the polls close while LinnieGayl can look at numbers and see the pattern immediately. Cindy, meanwhile, needs to look at the charts and write up stuff long hand before figuring out what any of it means.

When doing mini-poll analyses, in the interest of letting us all get a word in we usually e-mail a Word document back and forth that we constantly add to and revise. This time around, because of the enormity of the poll and all the charts that went into the analysis, we created a free blog that the three of us could access at any time and where we could look at the HTML code and tweak things to make sure all was perfect. Weird glitches happen with HTML and when Cindy and Lee couldn't get something to work, LinnieGayl could and likewise in all directions.

Finally, we were ready to send our finished product to Laurie to edit, critique and comment as she liked. Laurie always makes excellent suggestions and once we all made changes that we were all pleased with, we were good to go.

Thanks to all the readers who participated! Here are some of the comments we received with the ballots:

Cindy, Lee, and LinnieGayl

tags: lee  romances  top  aar  romance  cindys  linniegayl  100  poll  

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