For the first time this year, we've received submissions of both individual stories published as part of an anthology, and full multi-creative-team anthologies. This has highlighted a gap in our submission guidelines, and as a result, we have had to make a decision about which of these formats we will accept.
We have opted to allow individual stories that were originally published as part of an anthology, but to disallow full anthologies. In order to make sure that nobody is unfairly excluded because of this decision, everyone who submitted an anthology has been emailed and offered the option to resubmit another comic in its place.
The decision has ultimately come down to how we can conduct as fair a judging process as possible. It's our view that anthologies are very hard to fairly compare against non-anthology works, in a way that single story excerpts from anthologies are not.
In addition, the submission of a full anthology can unintentionally cause the anthology participants to fall afoul of our "one comic per category per creator" rule – for example, if a creator submits a solo work to “Best Art”, and a different creator submits an anthology that includes another of their works to the same category.
As a result, we think the fairest way forward is to allow the stories that make up an anthology to be submitted individually, while disallowing full anthologies themselves. This change doesn’t affect collections of work by a single creator/creative team, which will still be permitted.
With this in mind, we are adding the following rules text to the Selkies submission guidelines as of today:
We acknowledge that not everyone might agree with this decision, and that there are other areas of the Selkies which people might want to provide feedback on.
As a result, this year we are aiming to launch a post-Selkies survey to give the community a chance to weigh in. This will be your opportunity to send us feedback on a few different topics:
We hope that this will give the community a chance to throw light on any areas of the Selkies that aren’t working as well as they could be, as well as tell us where they think the awards have been performing well.
Thanks to everyone who has submitted in this round of the Selkies, and especially to those who have been affected by this decision – your patience is much appreciated. We look forward to sharing our shortlist with you all in October!