ANNOUNCEMENT BOOK | Pokémon Watty Awards

11/1/15-Special Awards are No More / Community Testimonials

Happy November everyone, Scarlet here!

So, I admit that this is a bit sudden of a change, but I've been mentally wrestling with the topic of Special Awards; I just decided to be drastic because I want to keep making the Awards a catalyst for recognizing well-written fanfiction.

When Charowak hired me to help revamp the Awards and run them in the meanwhile, they were a blatant popularity contest; people won more because of the size of their following and not the merit of their fanfics.

Last year, the contest's Category Awards transitioned from Community Vote to Judge Vote. I kept the Special Awards in to allow community involvement as I don't this to just be a closed-off review club; I want this to be a fair place where people can submit work and the community can help improve the work and it can be given the recognition it deserves.

Thus, along with the fics that fell in The Great Fanfiction Purge of 2015 (the due date for the contest), the Special Awards as we knew them are dead.

HOWEVER, I have come up with a few ways that the community can still contribute to the contest. 

Community Testimonials

The Reading Lists are updated so that they only contain the entries. Until the 25th of November, you can read the fics and then submit a testimonial for a fic/ several fics according to the categories that we used for the Special Awards. 

For the list of categories you can write for, please refer to the Community Testimonial Awards section of the Rules book

Requirements:

1. Please submit them via a Private Message to us, not below in the comment section.

2. When submitting them, make sure we know for what category and for what book.

3. Good writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, formatting) counts!

4. Obviously, this should only be for fics that are in the contest and also not written by you.

5. Write at least a paragraph (3-5 sentences). We want to make sure that you aren't just writing a dinky sentence, but please also don't write an encyclopedia; we just want to know why you think the fic deserves recognition for that category.

6. Be free to be frank, as we will tag the post for spoilers.

As long as you follow rules 1-5, you can write testimonials for multiple fics in a category. (E.g. If I wanted to, I could write a testimonial for "Trivial Disobedience" and "I'll Wait For You" and submit it for "Most Dashing Fanfiction Writer" [Note, that is a fake category]

P.S. Judges aren't required to do this year, but they will be required to do at least one testimonial  next year.

2. Spreadsheet/Community Commenting

This is more of something for next year, but I want to increase the constructive commenting we the community write on fics, especially because we might be catering to a larger audience next year...more on that later. With that, next year I'll be posting a spreadsheet that has links to all the fics and some information associated with them (are they completed, what site are they from, etc).

If you guys have any ideas for how to accomplish the above ideas or any other ideas you can think of to facilitate community within the contest, please comment them below.

Anyways, the Status bar on the main page should be updated with dates, so go check them out!

-Scarler_Regnar(-o-)