CONTINUATION OF PREVIOUS ANNOUNCEMENT.
Participants should not be left on hold after their entries have been accepted. There can be rounds or fun things to keep the participants busy.
ANS: Agreed. We’ll definitely do something about that.
Judges should be deeply interviewed to prevent the occurrence of judges bailing last minute; they should also give proper feedback, explaining why participants were marked down.
ANS: Yes, absolutely. A judge muted us right after bailing so we have learned from our mistake. We’ll give a format for the review in the next award.
Judges should be rewarded too.
ANS: The judges took out of their time to judge books so they should equally be rewarded. In the next award, judges will definitely have something to gain.
There should be individual stickers for genres.
ANS: This is still pending, as we’re not sure if we have enough time to make first, second, and third stickers for every genre. But we’ll let you know.
Many other suggestions are being looked into and you’ll see the outcome in the next award. Still on the case of the next award, we have decided that the next award will be one with better judges, more prizes for everyone, and improved rubrics. It would not have a fixed number of participants, rather, there will be a time frame for submissions AND there will be rounds (longlist and shortlists), resulting in winners from every genre. There won’t be any ties.
However, it comes with a cost — and that is the possibility of the award not taking place in 2022 (50:50 chance). If it does take place in 2022, it would be crossing over to 2023. We want as much time as we can to effectively map out the award. We have also decided to have similar stickers for every award (to distinguish ourselves. Consider the next award as the next big thing! Any comments should be as a reply to this post.
