Sunday, April 17, 2022

Lindenbaum post competition analysis

 

Image by Pat O Neill


Hello all! The Lindenbaum competition is over and the results have been announced. I loved running it and I felt very privileged that we had so many entrants who made the competition great. 

I would also like to thank the team of people that helped me during the competition:

Pat O' Neill for making the logo

Peter Agapov for sponsoring the competition

Crumbly Head Games for providing subscriptions of the Gamebook Authoring Tool for prizes.

Tammy Badowski for designing the certificates and doing lots of other things.

(Sometimes, I wonder how Wayne Densley did it all himself!)

So, I was thinking that I would like to do the competition again. I would also like to improve on it if possible. For this reason, I would love it if anyone has any feedback about the following points or any other feedback. If you do, leave a comment or email lindenbaumprize@gmail.com.

Time of year

Windhammer was done later in the year - entry deadlines were early September and winners were announced in November. This would mean that people have the summer holidays (if that is relevant?) to write their books.

I did mine at the time I did because I thought of it last August and thought that people could spend the dark, boring January writing. The results were announced just before Easter, which was busy for me, so I might extend it a bit. Does anyone have any feedback on the time of year?

Length of writing/voting period

I used the same time periods as Wayne Densley. I saw one person say that they didn't have time to read through all the entries. Maybe I need to extend it, but how much time do people need?

The old competition extended the voting deadline by about 2 weeks if there were more than 14 entries (which is what I did), but there is a big range of possible entries. The minimum number is 5 and the maximum number is unlimited. The 2012 Windhammer prize had 22 entries! I'm thinking that the extension should be a sliding scale based on the number, not just an extension based on the number of entries being over one number. 

Maybe something like 4 weeks minimum with an extra week for every 2 entries over 8 or something (just riffing here). Any suggestions on how long it took you?

Formats

Windhammer didn't have hyperlinking. I remember someone saying that they would like that, so I decided to hyperlink all of the books. I didn't ask the authors to do it because I wanted the competition to be as close to Windhammer as possible, but if I did it again, I might do that (it took a while!). Would authors be OK with that? What about volunteers who could do the hyperlinking?

I also saw a post about doing the books in epub. I don't know how long that would take and would almost certainly need a volunteer for that. Any volunteers? Anyone prefer epub? 

Any other formats people prefer?

The time of the vote

I said the entries should be in by midnight, but then I thought that might be confusing because they might think it's the day mentioned or the day after, so I made the voting deadline 5pm GMT which I think is easier to convert. I will probably do that in future competitions.

Volunteers

Any volunteers for next year?

I would like to thank everyone for making the competition as brilliant as it was this year! I look forward to the next one! You can find the entries here:

Lloyd of Gamebooks: Voting is now open for the 2021/2022 Lindenbaum Prize!

1 comment:

  1. Volunteers for doing what? Entering — definitely. Anything else, depends on what you need :)

    Time of Year — I liked it, something to do over the Christmas period, I might not have entered otherwise, summers are busy for me.

    Formats — There's a high chance that I wouldn't have read all the entries without hyperlinking, and I struggled more when it didn't work. I'd be happy to provide my own entry as a PDF with hyperlinks, because that's what I naturally produce (and I had to remove them to submit ... then you had to put them back in)

    PDF is the ideal format for me. I've no love for EPUB

    Time of the Vote — No preferences

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