Hey everyone! We’ve been working very hard to get all the applications reviewed, and we’re getting close – we’re definitely on track to have e-mails go out on April 7th as planned, and may (no promises!) be able to get them out a couple days early (but April 5th is absolutely the earliest possible date). We’ve fully rated 89 out of 102 stories, and here’s what we can say so far:
1. Ya’ll did amazing
2. No like seriously holy crap we are blown away.
3. In fact, we are so blown away that, in addition to inviting the top 20 rated authors to contribute to Add Magic to Taste, we’ve decided we’ll invite the next 20 highest rated authors to our Discord and also ask if they’d like contribute to a different anthology (entirely optional!) that we’re currently frantically planning…we don’t know the details of length, payment, etc., yet, but it’ll be “Legal Fanfiction” – transformative works based on an existing work in the Public Domain (current leading candidates are something by Jane Austen, something by Shakespeare, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – we’ll be inviting all our Patrons to vote, so if you’d like a say, maybe back us!). Participation will be optional to those who receive the invites, and people who accept will no longer be eligible to pinch hit for Add Magic to Taste. More details pending!
4. We also noticed that some of us were kinder graders and some of us were stricter, so we added a step to our review process – instead of just taking each person’s three scores, averaging them, and et voila, we’re done, we decided to statistically standardize each reviewer’s scores. This adjusts everyone to the same scale (which is from roughly -3 to roughly +3, with 0 as average) to ensure that people who got stricter reviewers weren’t unfairly penalized and people who got kinder reviewers weren’t unfairly advantaged. We’re sharing about this in the interest of continued transparency, and for people who request their rubrics after acceptances and rejections are sent out, we’ll indicate both your raw scores and your statistically standardized scores.
We’re really excited to be winding down this process, and we expect to have more information to share about the Legal Fanfiction Anthology and our preliminary list of authors accepted to Add Magic to Taste in about a week!