There’s a discussion going on on the FSFWA forum about this year’s Atorox award, especially the eligibility of stories published on the net. According to one comment, stories that have been self-published on the net wouldn’t be eligible to participate in the Atorox voting. This doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, although I understand the fear (if not think it’s justified) that self-publishing on the net is so easy that the total amount of eligible stories would grow too much. But a better way (in my opinion) to handle this would be for example to require that stories published on the net outside the “usual” venues need to be submitted to the Atorox administrator to be taken into consideration.
You could (if necessary) go further and demand someone else than the author submits the story. That way, at least two persons think it‘s worthy of Atorox consideration. Or think about other ways. But I don’t think that just the medium a story is published on should affect the eligibility (self-published on paper is good according to my understanding of the current rules).
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7 comments:
Submitting one's own story? Well, that doesn't seem quite the gentlemanly thing to do. A bit like voting for oneself - not really playing the game, as it were.
I don't, to be quite frank, see why stories published only on the web should be deemed unworthy per se. They might be substandard. So what? But if they're any good at all they certainly deserve a fair chance.
And what's more - this way they might get noticed a bit and what's more important - read by the those who had no idea they even existed. Otherwise who on earth is even going to be aware of them? And if they're entirely hopeless, maybe the author will be electrified by the inestimable glamour of the mere nomination of his tale and do considerably better next time around.
Somehow it seems so much healthier, more charitable and even more humane to err on the side of generosity. But that's only me.
I don’t see anything wrong with submitting one’s own story for consideration. After all, it is only about letting the preliminary jury know the story exists (and that you think it has merits). If you self-publish on the net you’re going to do some self-promoting if you want the story to be read in the first place, and I think this would go along the same lines with that.
Wouldn't that make the amount of texts unbearable for esiraati to read(whatever jury that may be in English)? T: Mirka
I very much doubt it would. And even if the amount of texts would increase significantly, that could be handled, for example—as others have also suggested—by splitting the work of the preliminary jury so that not everybody would need to read all the works. After all, their task is not to put the stories into an order of preference, but just to pick the ones that go on to be the nominees for the prize.
Tero, that's FSFWA, not FSWA. And not to be mixed up with SFWA - the American counterpart - either... Acronyms are fun! :-)
Thanks, Pasi! Typo corrected.
The meaning of the preliminary jury is that it reads everything. All the shit and boring stuff to the extend it knows if it is worthy to be presented to the jury.
If there are too many texts, the task should be split: meaning that we need more people to the jury.
T
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