ANNOUNCEMENT BOOK | Pokémon Watty Awards

12/22/17- Answering Your Questions and Complaints

Earlier this year, we ran a survey to determine how satisfied you guys were with the PWA, and what we could do to improve the competition. We've taken all the suggestions, compiled them anonymously here, and answered them.

If you don't see your suggestion, that means either someone wrote a more thorough question regarding the same topic, or we didn't deem your answer constructive enough for us to work off of.

So far the only issue I have noticed is the lack of response. No offense, I know the admin is busy on their own account and real life, but sometimes this can be a bit troublesome as a participant entered after the deadline but didn't receive the response immediately. I suggest you have at least one more admin to handle the account.

This was definitely a problem this year. Scarlet wasn't on much due to being busy with college, and I had multiple AP classes and a sport to prioritize over this account. Scarlet will hopefully be more active in 2018, but we will look into hiring a moderator if the issue persists.

The rulebook for this year's awards wasn't completely updated, leading to participants being misguided. I'd suggest you go the the entire rulebook at least twice before opening the awards.

This was due to a lack of communication between Scarlet and I. I was not aware that the rule book included dates, and never went through to update it thoroughly. This year, we will be revising it completely and proofreading multiple times to prevent this. We are terribly sorry for the inconveniences caused this year because of that mistake, and it won't happen again.

Even to be in my opinion the best Pokémon Watties ever, I think the PWA should make book reviews or a cover shop. I don't know, I just think other than Rule Book and Entries, and Winners, you should have a graphic designer as a cover maker, and start a review book!

You should check out @GottaReadEmAllClub, they offer both of those things!

Minimum and Maximum word cap across all entries, and stricter Inspection.

We only require word count to determine whether or not a story qualifies to be in short story; there's no reason to limit how far an author can go. Limiting the length of books across all categories would make for faster judging, but would limit the creativity of authors far more than we'd like it to.

We don't want the Pokémon Watties to be strictly for experienced writers. I entered myself in 2015, and my book was awful.I knew when I entered that I didn't stand a chance, but it was still fun to participate. We don't want to take that away from new authors. We only have inspection to ensure authors understand basic writing conventions.

I am personally against the community voting on special awards. I feel like it would be unfair to authors who have less reads to be put up against books with a higher read count. I think it would be better for judges to create a system amongst themselves on the critearia needed to win a special award and then determine the winner that way, similar to the regular awards.

We took steps this year to prevent a popularity bias in the special awards (nominating a small amount of stories for each award rather than letting every story be voted for), but the bias was still apparent with Monopoly taking over one third of the awards. Next year, we are going to limit how many times a story can be nominated, and we are going to require voters to provide a Wattpad username and email to prevent voting for yourself or voting multiple times.

We know the Special Awards are far from perfect, but please understand that we are making a lot of progress in fixing that. When this competition first started, you stood no chance if you weren't one of the most popular entries. This year, though there was still a bias, we had authors with few followers win Special Awards. The author of Pokémon Chronicles ZERO currently has 54 followers, and his entry won two Special Awards!