OK. I’ve had a run to burn off my fighting mood and a walk to get my brain working, and here’s where things are going.<\/p>\n
When I started the Pseudo-Official XYZZY Reviews, a couple of years ago, it was strictly a side-project. It ended up on the Awards\u00a0site, but it was off in a little corner and didn’t feel<\/em> as if it was part of the main thing.\u00a0It was my first year helping out with the Awards, and I didn’t want to rock the boat too hard. The Reviews were to a large degree an attempt to encourage the kind of IF writing that\u00a0I\u00a0<\/em>wanted to see more of; as far as recruitment goes, I just made public posts asking if people wanted to participate. I got a lot of responses and didn’t turn anyone away, even if their work didn’t fully meet the expectations I had for the project, because those were just\u00a0my <\/em>expectations, and who am I to make demands, right? While the results were decidedly mixed, nobody cared all that much, because it was\u00a0all<\/em> bonus.<\/p>\n The next year, things got changed around: instead of putting out a general call, I headhunted known-quality reviewers, preferably with category-specific expertise or interests. This worked\u00a0way<\/em> better, both in terms of the raw number of responses and in how consistently the reviewers were able to match the expectations I had for the event – which were still articulated as an informal list of rough principles. In a last-minute decision based on the realisation that doing it the old way was\u00a0stupid<\/em>, the reviews got adapted to blog format, moved to the front page of the site and rolled out slowly, rather than getting dumped en masse\u00a0<\/em>in one gigantic plain-HTML page.<\/p>\n This year… was mostly treated like last year again, apart from doing a bit more to promote it. That was an error, partly because ‘business as usual’ often tends to mean ‘let things slide’, and partly because the thing’s nature was changing even if I wasn’t.<\/p>\n