The Hall Monitor: Choosing the Winners

An inside look at the Black Library Readers' Hall of Fame

The Hall Monitor is published every other week, the day after the latest installment of the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame drops on Tabletop Battles. A cross between a director’s cut and a backstage pass, it’s a look behind the scenes at the Hall of Fame project.

One of the questions we often see from folks discovering the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame project for the first time is about the process by which a book gets into the Hall. Today I thought I’d take a little time to pop the hood and show off the machinery, because as you’ll see it does take a bit of coordination.

In a nutshell, to be inducted to the Hall a book must secure a minimum of 60% of the available Committee Votes. Let’s explore what that means.

First, what’s the Committee?

The Hall of Fame Committee is made up of eight volunteers who represent the Black Library community, and then a ninth “member” being the Vox Populi (or “voice of the people”). Besides me, the volunteers right now include:

• AJ of The Paladin Journal

• Arbitor Ian

• Jordan Sorcery

• Keri, of the WK40K Book Club

• Lenoon of Tabletop Battles

• Michael, of Track of Words

• Parker, admin of r/BlackLibrary

Each member of the Committee gets a vote when it comes to deciding what books are going to be inducted to the Hall, and we take the opportunity to discuss the books in Discord together alongside past (non-voting) members of the Committee. It’s a fun and engaging deliberative process as we look to assess the books on the standard of “cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance” to the Black Library.

Then there’s the Vox Populi. Those polls we conduct for each book? Those are the means by which the reading public expresses their collective opinion. Every book that gets more than 50% of the non-abstaining voting in the public polls has earned the Vox Populi endorsement, and this counts for four Committee votes.

When you combine the volunteer votes (eight) with the Vox Populi votes (four), this means that each book can earn up to twelve Committee votes. (I say “up to” because just like the public voters, volunteer voters also occasionally abstain from voting on a book, lowering the total available votes).

Once the polls all close, we round up the Vox Populi and volunteer votes and see which book(s) have cleared the 60% hurdle. Pop the champagne!

Um, I was told there would be no math?

It’s a natural question to wonder whether or not this method is useful and valuable, or just represents a needless overcomplication of the process. To illustrate that, let’s imagine that we’re only doing it one way or the other- not both.

Well, if we dropped the public “Vox Populi” vote, then I feel the project would lose a great deal of its legitimacy right off the bat. Now it’s just eight people rather than the masses of Black Library fans and readers, and I think we’d be hard-pressed to find any eight people who could speak for the entire community.

What if we dropped the volunteers and just went straight public vote? This one’s more interesting.

(Total books equal all candidate novels. VP Only indicates number of books that won the Vox Populi vote. Actual indicates number of books inducted into the Hall of Fame.)

Quick impressions:

1. We’re still in the era where Fantasy and 40K are considered relatively coequal partners in the Black Library, though the Necromunda and Horus Heresy lines have opened the gap up a bit. These days Age of Sigmar has only about a one-third share.

2. Under the VP columns, we can see what would happen if we removed the volunteer committee voting and made entry into the Hall a simple pass/fail on a public vote: one-half (87 of 173) of all novels ever published would be ensrhined in the Hall. At that point, is it really an elite Hall of Fame, or just a Hall of Good Books?

3. “Not so fast,” you might say. The Vox Populi vote is awarded to books exceeding a 50% threshold of the public vote. What if we made that 75%? That’s a fair point, and one that casts into focus the value of having the Committee in the first place. When we planned the structure of this initiative, we patterned this off of certain existing halls of fame (Soccer, NASCAR, Rock n’ Roll) that have impactful public voting alongside a committee vote. By selecting volunteer members of the Committee that represent important segments of the Black Library community, we get multiple perspectives that help critically assess which books truly are vital for the Readers’ Hall of Fame to have a credibility that stands on its own.

4. One thing that intrigues me looking at the data here is that 40K books are getting elected in at nearly twice the rate as Fantasy books. Even the Vox Populi vote is tougher on the Fantasy books, and I think that may be a telling indication of the decline of Fantasy over time. It’s not that there weren’t good books being written for the Fantasy line, it’s just that given that line’s diminishing prominence compared to the burgeoning 40K fewer of them have withstood the test of time. Put another way, how might we have seen the results for Fantasy if we were doing all this in 2016, say, rather than 2026? An interesting thought exercise.

Ultimately, having the expert panel helps offset some of the tendency for “block voting” we see in the results of the public polling as well. By “block voting” I mean voting for every book in a particular series based not on the contributions of a particular book, but rather on the esteem the series holds overall.

A good example of this is Gaunt’s Ghosts, but it also holds true for each book in a trilogy. Whereas the public vote seems to accord them all equal acclaim (in the words, they all get the “yes” votes), we on the volunteer crew look to assess each book on its own merits. Did Malleus, for instance, do enough to advance the trilogy and stand on its own as a Hall of Fame book? Was Hereticus a worthy conclusion to the beloved Eisenhorn series, or did it just sort of wrap things up?

These are questions that are probably interesting for only a small number of Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame readers, but that’s why this feature exists here on Substack. All of us on the volunteer committee feel a genuine sense of duty to the body of work, and of course we’re grateful for the continued input from the Black Library community at large.

After all, at least so far no book has managed to enter the Hall without first winning the support of the public in the polls.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to cast your vote this week!