Shortly after the Storyblogging Carnival began, I wrote a blog post explaining what was involved in hosting a carnival. It hasn't changed too much, but there have been a few modifications, so this is the updated version:
First off, I suggest posting
the announcement with the complete rules about a week before the Carnival takes place. Mine generally looks something like this:
The Storyblogging Carnival is an opportunity for bloggers to share examples of storytelling in blog format, whether they are fiction posted online or something else. If you're curious about what this looks like, have a look at some examples of previous storyblogging carnivals. The next Storyblogging Carnival will be the thirty-seventh, and it will be going up January 30th.
If you'd like to participate, please e-mail your story submissions to me at dscrank-at-alum.mit.edu (or post in my comments), including the following information:
- Name of your blog
- URL of your blog
- Title of the story
- URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
- (OPTIONAL) Author's name
- (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
- A word count
- A short blurb describing the story
The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, January 28th. More detailed information follows (same as always):
- The story or excerpt submitted must be posted on-line as a blog entry, and while fiction is preferred, non-fiction storytelling is acceptable.
- The story can be any length, but the Carnival will list them in order of length, from shortest to longest, and include a word count for each one.
- You may either send a complete story, a story in progress, or a lengthy excerpt. You should indicate the word count for both the excerpt and the complete story in the submission, and you should say how the reader can find more of the story in the post itself.
- If the story spans multiple posts, each post should contain a link to the beginning of the story, and a link to the next post. You may submit the whole story, the first post, or, if you've previously submitted earlier posts to the Carnival, the next post which you have not submitted. Please indicate the length of the entire story, as well as the portion which you are submitting.
- The host has sole discretion to decide whether the story will be included or not, or whether to indicate that the story has pornographic or graphically violent content. The ratings for the story will be decided by the host. I expect I'll be pretty lenient on that sort of thing, but I have some limits, and others may draw the line elsewhere. Aside from noting potentially offensive content, while I may say nice things about stories I like, I won't be panning anyone's work. I expect other hosts to be similarly polite.
- The story may be the blogger's own or posted with permission, but if it is not his own work he should gain permission from the author before submitting to the Carnival.
If you'd like to be added to the e-mail list, please let me know. Finally, I appreciate folks promoting the carnival on their own blogs, and I'm always looking for bloggers willing to host future carnivals.
This post is fairly long, and it looks like a lot of rules, but it's really pretty simple. Most hosts just copy these rules, but the thing you need to realize is that these are my rules. Every host can do it differently, and you ought to modify these rules to suit their hosting.
At the same time, you need to send out the announcement to the e-mail list. These days, we're using a Yahoo group for the e-mail list, and if you're interested in hosting, I'll send an invitation to join it. In fact, I generally send an invitation every time a new person participates in a carnival. While I'm willing to send out the e-mail if the host doesn't want to, it's better if you do it, as that way everyone will send their entry to you.
We're asking for a lot of information in the submissions. In addition to the usual for Carnivals: blog title, blog url, story title, story url, and description, we also want a word count, a suggested rating, and author name or pseudonym. We use all of this in the Carnival entries, so none of it's extraneous, but it is a lot.
Once all the entries are collected, you should read all the entries. I admit that there are times I've neglected it, especially for the serial stories where really reading the entry would require me to get caught up on the current story. Still, it's better if the host reads the story, as this allows you to adjust the ratings as needed. (I've decreased the rating for a couple of stories when I thought the author was too hard on the contents, and I've increased it a couple of times too.) This also allows you to comment on the stories if you so desire. Because you should read all the stories, and because there's no length limit, I suggest a cut-off early enough to give you time for that. I make it on Saturday night so I have all of Sunday, but I'm pretty lenient if people get an entry in late. That's also the reason why I take a maximum of twenty entries on a first come, first serve basis. If I had to read fifty entries, I'd never be able to do it. So far, we haven't received even twenty entries. This is, of course, up to you, and if you think you can handle fifty entries, you should go for it, but my rule is twenty, first come, first serve.
Then on the scheduled Monday the host puts up the Carnival. I think the format of the previous
storyblogging carnivals works well.
The description of the story--the blurb--comes straight from the author's mouth, in order to avoid editorializing and spoilers on the part of the host. (If the author has a spoiler in
his blurb, that's
foreshadowing.) Occasionally I want to use a different blurb from what the author proposed, if the author's is too long or too vague, and sometimes the author asks me for help, and in this case I try to discuss it with the author until we come to an agreement.
I don't double check the word count unless it seems off to me. Trust me, once you've read five or six stories of various lengths, you can usually tell where a story falls, and I don't think it's necessary to be exactly right on the word count... five words here and there won't make a huge difference, although it can place one story ahead of the other in the Carnival, if you list the stories in order of length like I do. It's not terribly important, but I also put stories in categories. Stories 999 words or less are brief stories, 1,000-24,999 words is a short story, 25,000-59,999 words is a novella, and 60,000 words or more is a novel. These are somewhat arbitrary, and in the first carnival I defined anything less than 2,000 words as a brief story. The basic definition of a brief story is that it is not much longer than a typical blog post (a non-
Steven den Beste blog post, that is). This post, by the way, is 1,698 words long. I list the stories in order of length. I do both of these because this is the Internet, and on the Internet, people have short attention spans, and I want them to know what they're getting into when they start to read a story.
Both excerpts and stories in progress are exceptions to the rules. In some ways they are similar--they are both incomplete stories. For excerpts, however, the complete story is available somewhere--preferably online, but not necessarily, while stories in progress are not yet finished. Their word count is whatever is available in the blog, although with an excerpt the full length is included (again, so the reader knows what he's getting into should he decide he wants to know how the story goes). Since a story in progress has an unknown length, and sometimes the author doesn't even know what category it will be in when finished, I don't even give an estimate of the final length.
Any comments the host gives on a story are his own. I do not comment on every story, or even most of them, and you shouldn't take the lack of a comment positively or negatively. I never comment on my own stories, for example. I also do not pan stories in my comments, although I won't rule out additional warnings for mature content (beyond the rating system). Sometimes I don't comment simply because I'm worried doing so will give too much away. If I feel I can comment without spoiling, and something in the story particularly
struck me, then I may say how it did. Other hosts handle this differently.
Finally, there's the matter of garnering attention. If you're hosting the carnival, you want people to link to it, right? First, don't forget to send out an announcement to the mailing list that the carnival is up. The other participants will link to it, and I link to every carnival. If you want others to notice, you need to work at it. Some blog carnival tracking systems will do it automatically, if you ping the right address or add the right sentence and link. Let me know if you're not certain--I used to send this information to each host, but sometimes I neglect it. Also send e-mails to your favorite bloggers and ask them to link.
Thanks to the automated carnival submission forms on some sites, we get more entries than we used to. These entries come directly to me, and I forward them to the host. Typically they don't have the full information we ask for, but I usually let that slide, although I may ask the author if something important is missing.
Okay, that's about it. Any questions?
