Awards Post-Awards 2015 Discussion/Survey

Post-Awards 2015 Discussion/Survey

Hello, so another awards season has come and gone (THANK GOODNESS). As always, we want some of your thoughts and opinions. They can be as short or as long as you wish.


Statistics:
It was requested that we include statistics for this years awards, here they are for your information.

Nominations

Before/Saga
11 people sent in nominations
17 Authors were nominated
27 different stories were nominated
58 different noms were sent in, 48 went to the voting round*

Beyond
11 people nominated stories
16 Authors were nominated
28 different stories were nominated
64 different noms were sent in, 52 went to the voting round*

*Note - Reasons for the different in noms sent in and voting round include, authors pulling their noms, stories with too many noms, categories that had enough noms get 3 or more to make a full voting round.


Voting

Before/Saga
17 people voted
17 different authors were nominated in at least one category
8 different winners
Best New Author was the most voted on category (17 voters)
Best All Around was the least voted on category (11 voters)


Beyond
15 people voted
16 people were nominated in at least one category
4 different winners
Best AU and Best Short Story were the most voted on category (13 voters)
Best Canon Relationship was the least voted category(10 voters)



General/Random stuff:

1) Last year we wanted to prevent people from sweeping the awards so we said authors could only have stories nominated in 3 categories plus be nominated in 1 author category (and it really worked in terms of getting a wide range of winners). Some did not like that, so this year we said a story can not be nommed more than 3 times. Which way did you/would you prefer? Should we get rid of this rule all-together?

2) Mods ran the awards, again (with a couple volunteers). Would you prefer we (try to) had the awards over to volunteers?

3) We combined Before/Saga from the start and left Beyond on it’s own. Should we do this again?



Categories:

4)This year we had 13 categories. Should there be more or less? The same?

5)We introduced the two “Best Relationship” categories. Did you like them? Should they stay or go?

6)Is there any categories that should go?

7)Do you have any suggestions (either from pre-move awards or original) for new categories?


Focusing on next year:

8)With the introduction of more Disney Canon and separation from Legacy, the Awards will probably have to be restructured. How should this be done?



Feel free to add any other comments that you wish.

 

If you want my (brutally) honest opinion, I think all the Luke/Mara stuff should be relegated to its own category next time. That way, other stuff in the same era(s) have a better chance to shine.

 

1. No opinion at this time.

2. I'd like to see volunteers occasionally. I think you two have done a fantastic job this year and last, but I think it's time for some fresh faces. If it stays in the mods' hands, I'm afraid it might eventually get stagnant. Different faces = different ideas, which is a good thing. I might be willing to volunteer at some point.

3. As long as Beyond stomps the other two in terms of eligible stories, yes, Before and Saga should be kept together to keep the level of competition in each group roughly equal.

4. See #7.

5. I admit that I never took the time to look into the noms for those categories, but I like the concept. I say keep 'em.

6. None.

7. I'd like to see a slate of "fun" categories in addition to the serious ones. These can be anything from the "rejected" ones listed here to anything you can dream up that can have two nominees. The way I see it working is that the "fun" categories would not be split by era and would receive no prizes except bragging rights (and maybe 24 hours of colors). In other words, they're just for fun and laughs. Especially laughs.

8. Let's wait and see how many eligible NuCanon (I refuse to call it Disney Canon ) stories we have. If there's enough, split them into their own "era" (i.e. have Legends Before/Saga as one, Legends Beyond as a second, and NuCanon as the third grouping). Otherwise, fold them into the existing eras.

 

Mav and I don't usually respond to comments in surveys such as this, but in the interest of keeping the peace, I will. To be brutally honest, I personally didn't like the fact that the vast majority of beyond was overwhelmed with L/M fics. However, the fans of those fics where the ones that NOMINATED and VOTED. If we were to have relegated all the LM stuff to their own awards, there wouldn't have been much left in beyond.

As brutally simple as this is, if you want to see more diversity in the awards, you have to try to make it happen.

However, if you can come up with a fair way to have character-specific awards, that will work with the participation level we have, I'm open to that.

 

I understand all that, Bri and Mav, hence why I limited my response to this one criticism.

Generally-speaking, I stay well away from the whole awards process, mostly because of personal reasons that don't really merit dragging them into the limelight (those who know me well might know what I'm getting at), and if something I've written is nominated, great, that's awesome. But I never expect it and I certainly don't hold out hope that my meager contributions to this site could ever help to foment a change in the taste of its readership—not that I would want or advocate for this to happen, mind.

Thank you both for taking the time to respond; I won't bring this topic up again (at least not in this thread, and only in others if it really deserves it).

 

So it's to the 'shipper's ghetto with us, then?

I don't want to derail the thread and will consider and later post my thoughts to the questions posed, but just wanted to respond on this point. If one doesn't participate in the nominations or voting, how can they expect things to change? It's a bit rich to not join in and then complain after the fact.

Only eleven people sent in nominations, and it seems that the readership here far outnumbers that. I like to see a wide range of fics nominated, and the posting of excerpts and the general process of the awards encourages me to seek out fics that I may not have read otherwise. But it requires fans of those fics to nominate them in the first place.

 

Good morning all!

First I'd like to thank everyone again for this whole process: nominators, nominees, voters, winners, mods and volunteers. This was a very enjoyable process for me because of the extraordinary quality of all the stories that were nominated and the fact that it made me read a lot of stuff outside my "comfort zone", and I'm really happy about that.

Before I go through Bri's list of questions I'd like to comment on one point and make a suggestion about the categories. The list of stories nominated in each category shows that we all have (sometimes wildly) differing interpretations of what a category means. For instance, if you look at the stories nominated as "best canon", you'll find one story whose plot is driven by a canon event, another that expands on a very short scene from the films, another that develops on an absolutely obscure tidbit of history that involves canon characters, another that is centered on a canon character but the author has created virtually 100% of that universe, etc. The same goes for AU fics (some change a basic premise of the SW plot, others just a tiny element, some are parallel stories, some keep the canon characters' personality, some keep only some essential traits, etc), for series, for canon characters, and so on and so forth. This is not to say that one nominator's interpretation of each category is better or more correct that the others', but I think it could be interesting to use this as a pretext to develop a discussion/workshop thread on what we mean by canon, what we mean by AU, what we mean by series, etc etc. It would not only give us additional criteria to nominate stories in the future but it would also help us improve our writing in general. Would you guys and gals be interested in this?

I'm happy with this rule either way but I think that, for fairness's sake, the rule that allows stories to go to the voting round should be consistent across the board, meaning not eliminating stories that have only one nomination in one given category because other stories have multiple nominations while in other categories we accept stories that have anything between 1 and X nominations. IMHO, either all nominated stories should go to the voting round or only stories that have 2+ noms go to the voting round (my personal preference would be that all nominated stories go to the voting round, even if they have only 1 nom.)

One additional rule we might want to consider is that a story that has won *any* award in one year cannot be nominated again the following year in any category, even in categories other than those it won. The point for me is to get as many stories as possible on that nomination list so that we get to know each other's work better, and I find that a story that wins one year gets enough exposure already.

Why do I sense that you want to get rid of the process? I think the mods did a great job, like every year, but more volunteer involvement could be fun too. I'll volunteer for that if DRL allows.

It would be nice for Before to have its own awards, so that the Before stories aren't buried in a list of Saga stories. I understand that the number of stories actually posted in Before is small, but wouldn't it be an option to have perhaps a shorter category list for Before alone?

Anything in the 12-15 range feels okay at this stage given the volume of stories we could choose from to nominate, but we might want to increase the number if/when we get lots of new authors with the release of Episode VII.

I like these categories, but with two caveats: 1. We should emphasise more that it doesn't have to be a romantic relationship, 2. I'd like the possibility to nominate the relationship between an ensemble of characters and not only two characters.

I don't think so, but I'm curious to see everyone's replies on this one.

Like jcgoble3 I think that having at least one crack! category could be fun.

I also have a suggestion for a "Random Award" category that overlaps with the above, ie nominators get to invent a serious or not-so-serious category and nominate a story for it (e.g. best Yodaspeak, best pilot fic, best space battle, best stretching the TOS, etc). Since we have more voters than nominators (I assume that this has been a regular pattern over the years?) it could be a lot of fun in the voting round. The award would go both to the writer and to the nominator that came up with the random category that gets the most votes.

If/when the volume of fics we can choose from for nominations increases, and if the number of Legends stories remains high, we can break down the Awards between Canon and Legends. However, if the number of Legends stories reduces dramatically after the release of Episode VII, they could also be treated as AUs. Bottom line, I think it should depend on the sort of stories that are actually posted on these boards (and I'd like to see the Classification of Story Eras Discussion thread get some more love these days )

First a minor technical thing. I'd like the excerpts thread to be broken into smaller posts -- perhaps one for each category instead of grouping 3 categories in a single post -- to make navigation easier. I deem this especially important in light of the fact that not everyone submits their excerpts at the same time, and with all the additions that were made over time I nearly overlooked some stories.

Also, I think it would be good fun to have "blurbs" for the nominated stories as we did for the reviewers.

About the presence of Luke, Mara and Luke/Mara in the Beyond nominations (and please nobody have a knee-jerk reaction here!): because my personal approach to this awards process is that it's an opportunity for me to read more/different things, and given the bulk of L/M stories in Beyond both in the nomination list but also in the eligible story list, I wouldn't mind having L/M in a category of their own. They were all great stories and I read them with great pleasure, but having them in a separate category wouldn't reduce their worth while giving people an incentive to nominate other stories in Beyond and thus giving people like me who don't spend nearly enough time in the Beyond department an opportunity to read different things. So I think that breaking down the "Best Interpretation of a Canon Character" in three subcategories (i.e. "Best Luke", "Best Mara" and "Best other") and to break down the "Best Canon Relationship" category in two subcategories (i.e. "Best L/M" and "Best other") would make sense -- we'd have just as many (if not more) Luke and Mara fics nominated but also more stories that don't feature them as central characters. Again, I'm not suggesting this to "park the L/M shippers in the ghetto" but as a way to get as many and diverse stories as possible on the nomination list.

EDIT - Following the conversation below:

I may be back later with volume II of this encyclopaedia

 

I agree with Chyntuck - perhaps have an exclusionary rule that a story that was nominated /won a previous year cannot be eligible this year.

I would love to participate in the ceremony itself. Maybe a blend or alternating fashion mods one day, then volunteers the next. I do like announcing 1-2 categories a day for a whole week.

I think the idea of having Before by itself especially if the number of stories grows is a good idea, or conversely, have a smaller number of categories for that era. For nomming/voting, for ease, perhaps these could be sent in a single PM.

Categories:

I would add perhaps "Best Response to a Challenge". A second might be: "Best Vignette" to separate it from "Short Story".

I love these! (OK, I used these to mean romantic relationships LOL but filial/friendship ones fit splendidly.)

I think I'd keep them all; I especially liked Best All-Around.

None.

Focusing on next year:

I think it best to see how the influx goes as to changing up. I do think with more Rebels stuff, that would probably fit in Saga or Beyond? Adding a tag to that rather than renaming the entire category would probably be simplest.

 

Can we see what the pre-move awards were, somewhere?

 

Ewok Poet There's a list of all award-winning fics from 2001 to 2010 here. The links go to the Wayback Machine but you can get a picture of the categories that existed over time.

 

I think it is good the way we had it this year.

I like the Mod run awards, but if there are volunteers wanting to do it, I am not opposed to that either. I guess I mean to say I have no preference.

I think if we start having a lot of Before and Saga to support separating them then we should, but until then we should keep it like it is for now.


Categories:

I like it. Maybe we have a 14th category added by popular demand. People can nominate and vote for a new category that will change yearly and it can't be the same two years in a row. So one year people may vote for "Best Villain" and the next year "Best love Scene" or "Best Death Scene".

I liked it. I think we should just clarify what relationship is to be Best Friendship/Romance/Family.

No.

Just what I mentioned earlier.



Focusing on next year:

I guess break it up into Legacy just like our current awards and then do the same for New Canon. If there is only a handful of new canon stories then just have a "Best New Canon" award. I doubt that will be the case though. I think the new canon fanfics will quickly fill up the boards.

I still don't like excerpts. I would much rather write a 300 word synopsis of my story to get people interested.

I also don't think L/M should have their own awards. I think every nominated story got to compete this year. If you don't think enough non-L/M stories are nominated...then nominate a non-L/M story! And vote! Would we have many non-L/M stories to compete if the L/M fics were given their own awards? Look at Best AU in Beyond...I think my story was the only non-L/M story nominated. It was an OC story. If L/M fics were off somewhere else my fic would have been there all alone. Although I would love to have won somethings this year, that is not the way I would have wanted to win. Winning because you are the only nominee doesn't really have the same feel to it. Everybody who reads fanfics has the ability to nominate and vote. All stories have the same chance to win. If L/M fans are the ones writing and voting then I guess a L/M story is going to win. I have a feeling this proposal won't be a big consideration after the movie comes out. I suspect people will have all of these new movie characters to write about in the Beyond category and L/M domination will fade. Sad to say, but I can see this happening...especially if EP7 doesn't suck. If it is full of Gungans then L/M may be here to stay.

I say keep all the stories together in the awards.

 

In response to the L/M question and getting exposure to other stories, I wonder if bringing back the Most Underrated (nominees must average fewer than 4 or 5 reviews per post) category might help? Or even expanding Most Underrated to 3 or 4 categories (e.g., Most Underrated Epic, Most Underrated Short Story, Most Underrated Canon Interpretation, Most Underrated OC)? That way L/M stories wouldn't be excluded, but the less popular stories might get some more attention.

I really like this idea:

 

As far as getting people to nominate stories is concerned--

I didn't nominate anything, but I did vote. And I will fully admit the reason for that is because I'm lazy. As it is right now, the onus for nominating is completely on the reader. You have to remember the stories you liked, remember if they were nominated, and then send in a PM. Voting, however, is a lot simpler as you can copy/paste the list of nominations into a PM and make your selection. If nominating was like that, I think more people would actually nominate. Now of course this would take a lot more work on behalf of the volunteers/mods, and I'm not sure how to make it easier. I think someone (taramidala?) recommended using a survey in order to do nominations--maybe something like that could work?

OR perhaps do it like the Hugos, where authors are allowed to say "these are my eligible works, please nominate them if you like". Then the mods/volunteers could compile the lists of eligible stories for each category. Obviously this would have to be limited to one thread, but perhaps it would work? Just throwing ideas out there.

 

Not that I actually have an opinion on this matter yet (I don't; I'm still mulling it over), but I should point out that people nominate one story per category (as I understand it). Combine them all together, and people have to choose between nominating a L/M story or a non-L/M story, and the majority will likely choose a L/M story (which makes sense given that that is the only active character index currently). Split them into separate categories, and then people can nominate both a L/M story and a non-L/M story, resulting in more nominations of non-L/M stories. So I don't think separating them would have left your story by itself, as long as the separation was done prior to the opening of nominations. Like I said, I don't have an actual opinion yet, but this is just some food for thought.

 

Or you could have nobody getting nominated for various categories. I know I nominated almost exclusively L/M stories because those are the only ones I read. Split up the L/M from the other fanfics and I probably wouldn't have nominated any stories and because I most likely didn't read the nominated non-L/M fics I wouldn't vote.

As I said before I think once the movie comes out we will have all different types of Beyond stories. I don't see a reason to make a change now when we are facing all types of changes next year with not only Before/Saga/Beyond, but new-canon and Legends.

 

A comment on my previous post in light of the replies of Jedi_Lover and jcgoble3 (I'll also edit the post itself for clarity). I think that having L/M stories as a set of stories the same way we have Before, Saga and Beyond and therefore having "Best L/M Canon/AU/All-around" etc would be over the top. However, judging from the first page of Beyond stories where there are at least 12 L/M fics out of 25, it's fair to say that L/M is a sub-genre by now, which is why I suggested we acknowledge it in the Canon Character and Canon Relationship categories. Only one Canon Character nomination in Beyond and ALL the Beyond Canon Relationship nominations were L/M (and I'm guilty as charged, I nominated one of those in each category) but I'm sure that people who read more Beyond stories than I do would be able to name a non-L/M relationship that they would have nominated if it weren't for the one-nomination-per-category rule.

Of course, all this applies only to these awards, and it may very well be the case that an influx of new writers pushes the question to the side next year, but it's something to keep in mind.

 

This sounds like an excellent idea to me. It would leave more chance for other things to be nominated and win in the relationship and character departments, while not shunting off L/M stories that happen to be the best short story/epic/all-around/what-have-you of the year off into a separate section (which I think could be really counterproductive.) I'd also somewhat like for the relationship categories to be further split. I know, I know -- but we had a number of friendship/family/whatever non-romantic relationships nominated and none of them won. And I suspect that will continue to be the case, though I could be wrong. I think if they had their own category where there was a chance, more people would probably vote for them.

 

I don't know if there's an easy solution to this (asides from more people participating in the nomination process. I wanted to, but I got busy during the bulk of the nomination process, so I couldn't really throw any nominations in for anything), but Before/Saga didn't feel like as much of a split to me as it did 'The Saga with two Before fics thrown in for good measure'. I know 'Before' has a really small pool of authors and stories to choose from, but I'd be up for trying to bolster Before's presence in the Awards, even if it stays linked with Saga (although that really doesn't do Before fics many favors).

 

It does seem like Before really gets the short end of the stick being lumped in with Saga. I doubt it would support a full range of awards currently, but maybe a handful of just-Before awards would help? As in, keep Before/Saga as a section but have 2-4 things in there that only Before stories can be nominated for? I'm not sure if that would be considered fair or not. Anybody else have an idea?

 

After giving this whole thing a bit more thought and discussing it with someone else, I've had a minor brainwave in the form of a small admission that will hopefully enable others to see where I'm coming from. Truth be told, I don't read others' stories very much, and I hadn't read any stories that, in my opinion, weren't already going to be nominated anyway (this is very much intended as a complement toward those stories).

As for how to make the awards better in future, it has occurred to me that if we want to get more nominations, perhaps it would be advisable to put the onus on the awards hosts and volunteers to determine whether or not a nomination is acceptable, rather than asking the individual to remember all the criteria when considering their nomination submissions. In just about every other contest, drawing, or election that I know of, the rules are enforced by those who have set it up, not the entrants and voters. This is especially applicable when nominations and votes are done by secret ballot (or, in the case of this forum, secret between those who nom/vote and the mods/volunteers); we don't know who's nominating what, so it doesn't matter if those nominations and/or votes end up getting rejected because they don't fit the agreed-upon rules. If a nomination or vote does end up not being accepted, again there's really no need to inform the submitter.

For me at least, the various rules surrounding the awards here are at least a small factor in my choice to not participate, and I hope the rest of you can forgive my previous coarseness.

 

I had a minor brainwave too during the night One thing that could help with more diversity in nominated stories is that each nominator cannot nominate the same story in more than, say, two categories.

To comment on @Goodwood's post above, in an ideal world nominated stories should be peer-reviewed. Given the number of nominators this year that doesn't seem feasible to me, but to return to my idea of blurbs for nominator stories, maybe we can ask nominators to justify their choice? e.g. "I'm nominating This Awesome Story for Best Canon because [insert explanation about canon here]" This would entail of course having a review committee of volunteers/mods but it wouldn't need to be a dozen people either.

 

On the issue of eligibility for past winners, that should/could apply to categories that are present from year to year, but for brand new categories in 2015 or later, they should be nominatable. Particularly if one is going to branch off the relationship category, or add something like Best Humor.

 

To be honest, peer-reviewed or justified noms sounds like it would complicate the process - it seems difficult enough to encourage people to nominate, and I think the number would drop if they had to explain why they're nominating for that award (or that they think there are going to be judgements placed on their noms.)

The awards are meant to be a bit of fun, after all.

General/Random stuff:

1) Last year we wanted to prevent people from sweeping the awards so we said authors could only have stories nominated in 3 categories plus be nominated in 1 author category (and it really worked in terms of getting a wide range of winners). Some did not like that, so this year we said a story can not be nommed more than 3 times. Which way did you/would you prefer? Should we get rid of this rule all-together?

I don't really mind either way, I will only say that it seems like it does skew the categories a bit. For example, in one category there were only two nominations, both for fics of mine which is great for me but doesn't really seem fair when other categories have four or five nominated fics. I can only assume that there were other noms which got pulled, perhaps because of the "3 categories" rule. Also, it does seem like a waste of a nomination if that nom has to be pulled because that fic was nominated for more than three awards - when nominating if I'd known that nominating in a certain category wasn't going to count I could have chosen a different fic to nominate. I would prefer to see more nominations per category, not less.

2) Mods ran the awards, again (with a couple volunteers). Would you prefer we (try to) had the awards over to volunteers?

Again, don't mind either way. If there are willing volunteers to take the load off the mods, great.

3) We combined Before/Saga from the start and left Beyond on it’s own. Should we do this again?

I don't read or write in Before so I can't really comment on this.



Categories:

4)This year we had 13 categories. Should there be more or less? The same?

I think it can be flexible to incorporate some more categories.

5)We introduced the two “Best Relationship” categories. Did you like them? Should they stay or go?

Yep, I liked them.

6)Is there any categories that should go?

Nope.

7)Do you have any suggestions (either from pre-move awards or original) for new categories?

I like what has been suggested upthread about some additional "fun" categories. It would be nice to split the Canon Interpretation back into male and female, and maybe some other categories like "best antagonist" "best ensemble" etc.

Focusing on next year:

8)With the introduction of more Disney Canon and separation from Legacy, the Awards will probably have to be restructured. How should this be done?

I agree that we should wait and see how much Disney-canon fic is written, and decide whether it should just be it's own category "Best Disney Canon" or whether it should be it's own section with a set of awards.

I don't think we should completely embargo fics that were nominated this year from being nominated next year - perhaps just that they are not eligible in the same categories that they were nominated in/won before.

My suggestions for nominations are as follows:

1. All nominated fics proceed to the voting round, unless the author pulls a fic for whatever reason or it is not eligible because of timeframe, it was nominated in the same category last year etc. As I understand this was what pretty much happened and few categories were overwhelmed with choices. Exceptions could be made if there are a flurry of nominations next year, say no more than five per category and in that case the five most nominated fics go through to voting.

2. Keep the "3 noms to proceed" rule, but allow nominators to nominate 2 or 3 fics per category. Then we're more likely to get a range of fics with multiple nominations to reach this threshold. The same rules aply - the top five go through (or near enough). I know when I was nominating it was so hard to choose between fics and I would have like to have recognised two or three per category.

 

​

I like the idea of allowing us two or three nominations per category. Since usually there are only about two dozen people nominating, let them nominate more and take the top 5 (or whatever number you decide) nominated stories in each category. This will definitely increase nominations.

 

Agreed; you shouldn't have to only pick one fic to nominate. That's what voting is for.

I still think allowing authors to compile a list of their eligible fics would be beneficial, both to authors and readers. Because someone could have posted a fic a long time ago and loved it but not remember it when nominations come along. I'd be more likely to see a list of fics and go, "oh yeah, I loved that one!" and put it on my list rather than trying to rack my brain for everything I read over the past year.