Hello everyone,
We are still deliberating over the proper next steps but I wanted to hop in and answer some questions and respond to some comments in the meantime.
We agree, we were planning on a horror-themed Writer's Camp for October, prior to our collaboration with Nanowrimo. Because of the collaboration, we felt that it was best not to pursue a specific genre. But moving forward we are planning on these types of events.
We try to address this by having two separate categories, one being an editorial pick and the other being a community pick. However, like most other contests, we do have subjective editorial guidelines to follow when looking at the top community picks - this is to allow us to have some flexibility if there are series that fall outside of the guidelines.
We tried to address this point by not allowing for our Premium Creators from entering as we have directly promoted their work internally and set up a foundation for success for them.
We are also still growing out the novels reader base so having creators from outside of Tapas bring their fans to Tapas is actually beneficial to the community as a whole - we find that the average Tapas reader has multiple series in their reading list.
Also, we reserve the editorial award to entrants that might not have had too many subscribers during the contest.
We agree.
It depends on the scale of entrants moving forward - for larger scale contests at Tapas like the Incubator Program, our entire editorial team dedicates a majority of their day to looking at entries and fielding questions. Our novel's editorial department is much smaller and run a number of operations outside fo the contest. In terms of logistics, we would love to read every episode of every entrant, but we are limited to our internal resources. We would also prefer not to disclose every detail regarding how entries are processed - just that they are being read and reviewed during the application and selection process.
Hm, I think there's been some miscommunication over this topic in particular.
We try our best to evaluate each reported story or episode on a case by case basis. I do believe that in order to properly understand the situation, we need as much context as possible. If there's a sex scene within a story, what's the purpose of it? How is it depicted? What is the relative frequency?
There's a fairly stark difference between reading a story that simply states "And then they had sex" (please excuse my poor writing), versus a story that goes into a paragraph(s) long description of it, right? So, it's not always easy to specifically outline what is and isn't acceptable.
We are however developing better information and ways to ask our staff in some Creator Dashboard improvements coming soon.
Thanks, we appreciate it!