Court Reporter · 2mo
Hi! I've been looking forward to this project and I wanted to apply as a writer but I had a few questions. I was wondering if you could talk more about the portfolio requirement and specifically why you're not allowing ao3 links? Every other zine I've seen that asks for a portfolio allowed writers to use their ao3 accounts, so I was wondering why that wouldn't work here? Are ao3 links allowed to individual fics for the 3 samples? Also, I was wondering how you decided on the 10 writer limit? I understand that fic typically takes up more page space than art, but since this is a digital-only zine I thought that wouldn't have been an issue. Does the ratio of artists to writers reflect the results of the interest check? Thank you!
AO3 portfolios are often commonplace in the zine community! But while writers are free to submit links to individual works on AO3 as samples, we ask that they not use their AO3 account as a portfolio for the same reason we ask an artist not to use, for example, their Instagram: the amount of content. While definitely not applicable to everyone, we must assume that a writer's account likely includes a significant amount of works, not all of which will put your best foot forward to demonstrate the skills and meet the requirements we're looking for in the zine. We must also add that these evaluations, especially writer evaluations, simply take time. Our mod team is only human, and only has a limited time within their own and the project's schedules to review everyone's work and publish results in a timely manner.
We want to offer everyone a fair look at their work, and our mod team a fair opportunity to do so. Therefore, for the benefit of everyone involved, we ask that all our writer applicants curate portfolios of five or more personally selected works— which may be as simple as a shared folder of documents. As long as they fulfill what we're looking for, and succinctly show off all the skills you desire!
As for our writer spots— While this number may seem small in comparison to the available page artist spots, we must reiterate that ten is a significant amount of people! And of course, being writers, it's only natural for these contributors to take up a higher amount of pages per work than an illustration. We may be a digital zine with no page count to budget for, but we must still consider the balance of illustrated work to written work when formatting, particularly with our word count permitting slightly longer than potentially standard works. Four to five artists per one writer is often the ratio one will see in zines, and one we feel most comfortable in.
And while we do intend to welcome in a large amount of contributors, scope is still a concern we must prepare for. We would love to accept every writer, as we would love to accept every applicant, but this is simply not feasible for our mod team. And for our writing mod working with all of our writers to produce the best work they can, simply not feasible for them especially. Again, we're only human! So we hope you can understand these decisions, and to all our writers, we wish you the best of luck!
