Jiji · 2d
As a consumer of the zine, I'm pretty bummed to see so few contributors for an anniversary project, especially writers. Only three? That's so few, especially when the list is already small. Is there a reason you decided for such a small project, and why so few writers? I love art, don't get me wrong, but when it comes to these older fandoms, fanfiction has way more of my attention. For the 35th anniversary, it would have been nice to see more folks included.
Hello,
Thanks for reaching out—we definitely hear you! Our project is a love letter to one of our favorite fandoms & we wish we could've accepted all ~350 applicants.
Our project has been scaled since the beginning to be both manageable in workload for our mod team & capable of breaking even with full compensation for our contributors. We considered IC data and sales trajectories of recent Ghibli projects when determining the scope of the project, the number of contributors to accept, and other specs before launching apps.
Our info doc (x) has always been clear about the number of contributors we planned to accept, with a breakdown by role as well. In this case we opted to keep the contributor count low to ensure that writers had plenty of pages for their work without exceeding our planned budget. In fact, we expect to have more than half of the book focus on text!
Trust us when we say that this was a tough decision to make. If money and time weren't factors for this hobby project, we guarantee everyone would be in our server right now. Since they are, though, we put a lot of time and thought into this decision. We hope you understand!
