Lambda Literary has the news:
The news you’ve been waiting for: after four months of reading, deliberating, and consulting, 87 dedicated (and eye-weary) judges, assessing 462 LGBT-interest titles nominated by almost 200 publishers and authors, have selected 112 finalists in 23 categories.
“This has been a record year for queer books,” said the 2009 Lambda Awards Administrator, Richard Labonté, who has been associated with the Lammys since their inception in 1989 as a judge and consultant. “The number of titles nominated and the number of publishers represented is in both cases about 10 per cent higher than last year.”
And, for the first time, the single catchall Bisexual category – after reaching a threshold of 10 nominated titles in both fiction and nonfiction – has matured into two distinct categories, Bisexual Fiction and Bisexual Nonfiction.
Read who is moving forward here (you’ll see FoAN Malinda Lo’s Ash, yay!). Congratulations all.
Nicola Griffith 
Cool.
I vote for Ash! Not that I have a vote, but if I did…
Sometimes the judging process is difficult: too many good books, or (rarely) no book that seems good enough. Sometimes it's really, really easy because one shines so brightly it's obvious from the beginning it will win.
I wonder how the judges are feeling this year. We all owe them a drink, I think.
I'm sure you are right. It's gotta be a tough job a lot of the time.