If this already exists, my apologies, couldn’t find in Advanced Search or Categories.

Would be nice to be able to search for premium stories.

Thanks, great site. Thanks for all you do.

Shiv

I’m glad you’ve dropped the top SOL stories auto nomination idea since there are one or two other sites out there that publish quality literature and the Clits should be accessible to all.

Regarding vote fixing with multiple e-mail addresses, the capture of the sender’s ISP or IP Address could prevent this abuse. Votes for the same story with this info witheld or duplicated could be censored out.

As far as the automation of nominations for SOL or any site, SOL or any other story site can include a link to nominate with any story posted on the site. The link can lead to a form where the reader enters contact info (name, email, etc.) and reason for the nomination. This would not only make it easier for readers to nominate stories, but it would also inform those who do not even know about the awards or nominations.

Along with the voting or comment link that goes automatically with a story, a nominate link can be right beside it.

Thanks,

Freshly

Or is there already a category where I could nominate a series rather than a single story?

First, I think the "short or long" option Griezz suggested for the story length issue is a good idea. Medium gets fuzzy.

As for self-nomination, I personally would never do it but I might ask my fans to do it for me (for instance I might point out that they should nominate it several times for several different categories). I don’t think that’s wrong since it’s well known that for Golden Globes/Academy Awards/etc. the movie studios "lobby" the powers that be a great deal to get their movies recognized. There are tons of great Oscar winning movies (Shakespeare in Love, anyone?) that would never have gotten nominated had their studios not so aggressively campaigned for them. In the end, though, if it’s an unworthy story it’s just not going to get nominated or win!

In conclusion, I used to look forward to the winning lists because they provided great stories to read that I might have missed throughout the year. I hope people on ASSD and SOL.net, with the help of Lazeez, can make it a great system again for recognizing great works. I’d be willing to help in any way I can…!

Thanks!

-shannon-

Stories that start in one year and end in another seem to be left out.

I am specifically referring to “Making of a Gigolo” by Lubrican–one of the best stories to be on SOL in the more than ten years that I have been reading.

And there are many more than that one that deserve a chance to get recognized.

s/Mike

While it may be true that dyndns.org does not deliver confirmation messages, that certainly does not hold true for the many many *many* people who have DynDNS subdomains.

Maybe I’m showing my ignorance here, but as a reader, I don’t know how to tell how many words are in a story. The file size might indicate to me that it will likely be a multiple chapter story, but other than that I wouldn’t know if it was very short, short, long, very long or agonizingly long. If it keeps my attention all the way through, it’s a good story. If it rings my bell while I’m reading it, then I’ll think about nominating it for whatever category it seems to fit into.

As an author, I’m left flat by the idea of self nomination. Every author thinks his or her stories are great. You may as well nominate them all. I don’t think I could be proud of an award that was the result of me saying “Please give me an award.” I also think that the concept of self nomination will rob the awards of the respect the reading public has for them.

At the very least, if a story is self nominated, it should be clearly listed that way, so the readers know it was the author who nominated it.

Of course if a story then gets more nominations after that, the “self nominated” tag could be removed. I personally think it would be even better to show the number of times each story has been nominated. I realize that amounts to “early voting”, but so does the nomination process itself, really.

Best Editor catagory, well, I’d nix that. For one thing, how can we tell what is editing and what is the writer? And besides, nobody ever puts ‘edited by-’ in their book title page, so it’s a non starter. Yes, I do realize how much good editing contributes to the readablity of a story, but how can you actually vote for something like that?

Looks like the Awards will be in good hands, and thank you Laz for stepping up and continuing them.

Strange how a couple of stories that I was going to nominate were done in previous years. Guess that my long term memory is fine, it’s just the immediate things that I am having trouble with. (Where’s the remote? What did I come in here to buy? What did I do with the car keys? Where’s my glasses? How can it be Monday already?)

Thanks for taking on this task.

Paige

Keep the existing categories – it’s more than enough

Re: Genres

It’s too easy to go overboard and easily leads to countless genres needing representation. If you’ve got an award for best “furry” story, why not best incest story? Threesome story? Group sex story?

Besides, it can be hard enough to know where a given story should be nominated when many stories belong to multiple genres.

Griezz

Lastly, thank you Lazeez for taking this on!
–
Sam

Flash: up to 1,000 words
Short: 1,000 – 7,500 words
Medium: 7,500 – 20,000 words
Long: 20,000 – 50,000 words
Very long: 50,000+ words

If possible it would be good for the site to know how long a story is and move it to the right category. So if FooStory is 19,750 words long and submitted to the “Best long story” category the site would say “FooStory is not eligible for the “Best long story” category so it has been nominated for “Best medium-length story” instead. If you would like to withdraw this nomination click here”. If submissions are done by email, then provide a link to the website or an email link to withdraw.

This brings me on to another idea – users should be able to see which stories they have nominated and be given the option to withdraw any of them.

I agree also with whoever (it might have been Gary Jordan) said that every story nominated (or perhaps every story that receives at least 2 nominations) should go through to the vote. Have a second round of voting for the 5 highest scoring if needed.

The Silver Clits are awarded for best story of the month, and when they were active one of them was voted best story of the year. If they are not active, it would be good to continue to give this award. Perhaps every story that receives at least 2 nominations in any category should be automatically entered into this category (author opt-out notwithstanding).

I agree that it involves very different skills planning, and talent to writing flash, short stories, novelettes, and novels. Thus it’s reasonable to separate into some broadly recognizable categories, but should never be over-done.

I’m especially reserved about those beyond novelette level. I don’t really see a difference in excellency or craftsmanship that leads to different level of works there.

And for Lazeez, if you haven’t already put my name on your volunteer’s list. I’m in.

Micro-Fiction: up to 100 words
Flash Fiction: 100 – 1,000 words
Short Story: 1,000 – 7,500 words
Novellette: 7,500 – 20,000 words
Novella: 20,000 – 50,000 words
Novel: 50,000 -120,000 words
Epics: Over 120,000 words

With regard to the Monthly Silver Clitorides: If you wish to make a quarterly award, by all means do so. But PLEASE choose another name. Platinum, Mithril, Bronze, Brass, even Aluminium. While they were active, the Silver Clitorides were associated with being monthly, and were listed so at Jane’s.

I don’t have any connection to other story sites, so I guess it’s not a close community at all. It’s up to authors to encourage the other sites to participate. I’m open to all participation. I’m planning to create a banner for the awards as well as a system for authors to register their own stories on the awards site and create a direct link to nominate their stories, something like digg’s links. However, this will give the advantage to authors who participate and make the effort to promote their stories.

@Garry Jordan:

That was my real motivation. Whatever the reason for your stop or souvie’s, the awards suffered. So a site with multiple moderators is more stable. And stability is good for this kind of thing.

“One person, One vote” is impossible without sacrificing personal privacy. So it’s impossible to do. The best that I can do is ‘One email, one vote’.

Once I’m done with the golden awards, I will do the silver awards, however, from previous experience, monthly awards may not get enough nominees all months, so I would suggest changing the silver awards to Quarterly awards instead.

@Wizard:

Every author sees their own stories in a different light. From my experience with storiesonline when I implemented the story genres, there could never be enough genres to satisfy everybody. However, if the request gets seconded, I’ll add the category.

@DB_Story:

Currently we have flash story, short story and long story. Flash can’t be considered with ‘under 5000 words’ it’s already defined as under 300 words.

So we need to expand the length considerably. If we consider your suggestion, we’ll need 5 categories:

* Flash
* Very short
* Short
* Long
* Very long

Any suggestions? additional support?

For everybody that volunteered, thank you very much.

I’m still working on the moderation side. I’m having hard time finding the time to do it, so it will be a little while at least. When it’s done, I’ll make an announcement on SOL and on the clits site. Meanwhile, the way to do it is to register a user account on the Clits site and email me and give me your user name there; I’ll upgrade your account and when the system is up and running, you should see the difference.

Best Story under 5000 words.
Best Story 5000 – 25000 words
Best Story 25K – 100K words
Best Story Over 100K words

Different length make for very different kinds of stories, and it’s not fair in my mind to make them all compete in just one or two categories.

–DB_Story

I would like to volunteer as a nomination moderator. I am not a writer, but I am a long time reader at a number of different sites. I am retired and have time available.

All I can say is best of luck and have fun and I wish you all well.

.B

As far as new categories, I’d like to see a COMING OF AGE category. Two of my Trailer Park books were nominated in the last two years as humor stories, and while they contain humor, that’s not how I see them.

Best Editor would be a great category but impossible to judge. I’d nominate Russell in a heartbeat but only a couple people see my raw output and would realize how hard he has to work.

Good luck.

I wish Souvie could have kept up with them, but in her case it was Real Life and a new marriage that interfered.

I’m glad you decided not to auto-nominate from SOL or anywhere else. The awards would have ended up exclusively the SOL Awards.

I inherited the “most nominated=finalist” meme from Maria, John, and Rui Jorge. I never liked it. It added an unnecessary layer of complexity. I think you should let EVERY story that’s nominated be voted for. Now, if no story earns 50% of the vote, take the top 3 or 4 or 5 and have a run-off. What I saw with “most votes wins” is that of 10 stories, one might get 11 votes, and nine might get 10 votes each. Is that story really a winner?

The hardest thing I ever had to worry about was voting fraud. Everybody and his cousin can have 99 email addresses these days. Do you have any idea how to keep it to “one person, one vote”? Does it matter?

Good luck!

Oh, for the people who were proposing an award for editors and such – with the Golden Clitorides comes the “Sons of Martha” site. Check it out.

Gary

Simple volume of work should not help a nominated author to gain indirect advantage. Thus candidates for “Best Author” should not have an inherent advantage if they write lots of short stories nominated as against writing one superb novel (which took a year to write).

The idea of “Best Editor” seems very strange to me. I am sure most editors do not regard editing as a competitive activity, nor are they trying to please the authors for whom they edit. An author tries to please an audience (and awards can measure that) whereas an editor tries to help an author.

Maybe you should think about involving others who run sites where erotic stories are posted to do what the anonymous poster said and put links, at the bottom of stories, on SOL or other sites, so that people who read the stories during nominations and during voting would have a link, right there, to go and vote for the story. It would take the cooperation of those who ran the various sites but it could be done. If you can’t get, at least, the five or six largest, most popular sites, I wouldn’t do it at all for exactly the reason the last poster gave, it would skew the vote in FAVOR of the site or sites that did do it.

I have no idea how closely tied the erotic story site community is. Whether you know, or have had contact with others who run similar sites. If there’s very little, I wouldn’t do it. If you know the people, then it’s a possibility.

One other thing, possibly build a banner of some sort for the GCA’s that other sites could put up, especially during nominations.

This may have been done in the past, but I’ve never seen it. Then make sure that the site owner(s) know of the GCA’s and see if they’re willing to advertise. The more sites that advertise, the more stories will get nominated, the more votes that are received, the better the selection will end up being.

Rewarding reviewers is even worse of an idea. Other than SOL, how many reviewers are there that anyone would recognize? And even on SOL, there were only 23 reviewers this year, by my count. Besides that, reviewing should be a service provided to aid readers in making story-reading decisions, not an attempt to gain recognition.

Auto-nomination is likewise a bad idea. A slightly better one (which would no doubt skew things in favor of those posting to SOL) would be to provide a link – at the bottom of each story posted in a given year – to submit a nomination for the awards. Actually, if this was a standardized link which could be provided to other story sites, it could offset the skewing… although the higher readership of SOL would likely still skew things.

Like others, even though the matter seems settled, I don’t think there should be “automatic” nominations from any site. Quite simply, SOl and other sites that have ratings also have audiences that enormously prefer certain types of stories and don’t like others.

I would not like to extend the categories much, if at all. Best editor in particular is a category that can’t be measured by the reading public. Best Site would almost certainly always go to the site with the most readers and Best Reviewer is doubly subjective.

Count me in for whatever you need me to do.

JJ

One thing that would be useful for the site is a list of the stories you have nominated. I’ve got a list of stories that I’ve been waiting to nominate, but this list is spread between three computers and probably contains duplicates.

It is also not clear whether you can vote for multiple stories in the same category.

I intend to keep the awards site and storiesonline as separate as possible. I prefer that the site be administered by a committee. If there is enough interest in such endeavour, we’ll have to agree on the rules governing this committee and how it’s formed. If I don’t get enough interest, I’ll do this as a solo effort, hopefully with the support of the community.

I’ve posted the Awards’ FAQ, which is basically the rules. They’re on the site and I’ve posted a copy on storieswiki.org.

http://storieswiki.org/index.php/Clitorides_Awards_FAQ

Anybody can make changes, please discuss potential changes in the talk page.

I haven’t looked at the site either, but, as a reader and past voter I do have one recommendation. Each story nominated should have a link to where it can be found, and read. I saw all kinds of nominations that looked interesting, but didn’t know where to find them and didn’t have time to search multiple sites. That might increase the number of nominations for stories already there. I didn’t understand for the first year that a story could be nominated more than once, and that that mattered.

Once again we owe a debt of gratitude to Laz. He’s either a prince of a fellow, or a glutton for punishment. Maybe both.

1. I read what Cazna said earlier (12/2 10:46 pm) and would second both points.

2. I would also endorse a few others’ point about avoiding auto-nominations.

3. With respect to the categories of “Best…of the year”, why not try something different. Close direct nominations for those categories. Let direct nominations go to subject categories like “Best Hetero story”, etc. or whatever. Glean nominations for the overall categories from the subject categories. For the best author category, count the nominations for actual stories under his/her name.

3. Perhaps the date structure could be liberalized a bit. For example, stories posted early in the year are “out of sight/out of mind” by the time December rolls around. If there were no calendar restriction readers might reflect on their total reading experience and remember works that they liked regardless of posting date. I know there’s a “Classic” category, but it doesn’t seem to be enough.

4. Think about adding the following three categories:
a. Best reviewer
b. Best editor
c. Best site

That’s all I have right now.

AW

Second, I agree with earlier comments. Stories from SOL, no matter how well rated, Should NOT get automatically nominated. It makes it feel like a story on SOL would get preferential treatment. I think it would make people second guess their idea of nominating a story that isn’t posted on SOL.

Keep the two entities, SOL and the GCA, as separate as possible!!!!!!!!

I haven’t looked around the new site yet so I don’t have any ideas on what improvements to make there but I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.

-Jefferson

In another vein, I would not be in favor of any automatic entries from any source. If the story doesn’t generate enough interest to be nominated by a reader I can’t see how it would merit consideration.

I also have a suggestion but I’m pretty sure I’m not qualified to do it myself, though I think it needs to be done.

Previously people have used the relatively unknown aspect of the awards, outside the asstr community, to their benefit. I think a brief history and explanation of the whole process should be made available in a prominent spot. In my view the wider the distribution of the details, the better.

I should also point out that I think Lazeez’s participation can only be a big step forward for the awards. His technical expertise and experience will be beyond value for the stability of the award process and I for one hope he can be convinced to do the same for the Silver Awards.

cmsix

1. A link on the front page to a page where people can see the rules without having to register – you’ll get more interest that way.

2. A link to a page where the current nominations are listed.

Just a couple of ideas for you. I, like many others, like to be able to see if I really WANT to register before I actually do register.

I’ve never really paid much attention to these awards (even though I’ve read some of the awarded stories), because my works weren’t even remotely comparable. I therefore have little knowledge of the volume of nominations.

What you as SOL administrator can hopefully promote the award, besides handling the process, is probably dedicating a small corner directing readers’ interest to these highly regarded works.

1st, I need volunteers to do the moderation on the site. That means, when a story or author nomination comes in, somebody needs to check the nominations for eligibility. So a moderator needs to check the actual story nominated for date of posting, kind of story and stuff like that and make a decision whether the nomination is accepted. Also, moderators need to check for duplicates, for example many stories are posted on multiple sites. So a moderator may need to mark a nomination as a duplicate of another (that increases the number of nominations a story or author gets).

In the beginning, moderators should also be beta testers for the admin functions of the site. I think of all the features that may be necessary, so while I would start with the implementation, I need suggestions how to make it better.

Another point of discussion:

Somebody suggested a long time ago that stories on storiesonline that get a certain score should get automatic nomination. Does that make sense? should it be that way?

Many of the rules that governed past years were done because the moderator of the awards didn’t have enough time or resources to enforce many rules, that’s why we need to re-discuss those rules.

That’s all I can think of right now. I’ll post more as I get more feedback.

I can offer a little of my spare time, but after reading your blog, I still am not sure what kind of assistance you’re seeking. Anyway, when given the job natures, I think you can count me in for some dirty works.