And the first round is over! So, what did you think?

[jane_elliot]

The first round of the Small Fandom Big Bang Challenge has come to a close, with eight stories posted, clocking in at over 100,000 words total!  Thank you to all of the authors who participated in the challenge and to all of the volunteers for their fabulous assists!

As you are all aware, this is the first challenge for myself and the SFBB team,

Comments

[jane_elliot]

Thanks for your comment!

With regards to the artwork component -- we would have *loved* to have an artwork component. Unfortunately we had a tough time finding artists; we had a couple of folks who were considering doing artwork for the longer challenge, but no one expressed an interest in doing the shorter one. And, of course, if we couldn't find artists for all five fandoms, then it wouldn't have been fair to all of the authors to have artwork available for only some of them. Any suggestions on how to recruit artists would be greatly appreciated.

That's really good to know regarding how much regulation other BB challenges have -- we weren't sure how much we should use and we are definitely open to changing that.

With regards to the two beta readers, I have to admit that isn't likely to change. The reason why we require two is, in fact, so that only one needs to be familiar with the fandom while the other can focus strictly on grammar and writing issues. In the long run, it's to help us match as many authors and volunteers as possible.

Re: limiting the fandoms/pairings. The good news is that there won't be any pairing limitations next time around. We will still be limiting the fandoms (otherwise we wouldn't be able to offer the support that is the hallmark of this challenge), but with each year we'll be adding five fandoms to the mix. In a few years we'll be up to twenty or thirty fandoms, which will increase our visibility. Hopefully by that point we'll have the bugs worked out of the site.

Thanks again for your comments. As we mentioned at the start, this was our first time doing anything like this and we're looking forward to improving for next time.

[jane_elliot]

Honestly? I think you would do better and run a more successful challenge if you focused more on advertising in the various fandom communities than by offering your 'hallmark' support. Most writers I know prefer to work with people they know and have relationships with, especially on a fic with this scope.

The limitations you put on your challenge put off a lot of people. If you had left the fandom choices open and spent more time advertising in various small fandom communities (especially Yuletide), I think you would have had a much better turn out (for writers and artists) and run a better challenge.

[jane_elliot]

We advertised quite a bit for the challenge, in comms for the individual fandoms and in the Yuletide comm. I guess we could have done more, but at a certain point it becomes less advertising and more badgering, which would have turned people off. I especially didn't want to overuse Yuletide, since we only posted there at the sufferance of the Yuletide mods and I'm hoping to announce the round two challenge on the Yuletide comm as well.

I have to admit, the overwhelming majority of the feedback we've gotten with regards to the support for the writers has been positive, so I don't think we'll be giving that up.

I agree that limiting the fandoms has limited the number of folks who signed up, but organizing a challenge like this simply isn't possible for an unlimited number of fandoms. Especially if we want artwork (which we haven't given up on yet, even if it takes a round or two to get the kinks out of the system). It's possible we could have more than five new fandoms each time around, but considering we only had stories submitted in three fandoms (though authors signed up for all five) it seems that a better strategy might be picking even fewer fandoms and being sure that they are active. It's a fine line -- a lot of small fandoms aren't active, but you need to have a fandom with momentum to encourage an author to write such a long fic. Especially since long fics in small fandoms are traditionally ignored (especially in challenges like Yuletide, where anything over 2,000 words has a hard time finding an audience).

You're certainly giving us lots to think about for the next challenge:) Thanks for the comment!