Hi, Zulie.

Great to have a staff post on this vexed and vexing subject. Those categorised examples from the curators will be very useful, not only to nominators, but above all writers. To be honest, I would say that a skilled and experienced nominator probably shouldn’t even be nominating a piece that clearly falls foul of those factors, but they are still useful criteria to consider before submitting a story. I would certainly want writers submitting to my pub to be avoiding those pitfalls, even if they don’t hope or expect the story to be nominated, simply to maintain high quality standards.

Since the curators have given you their insights to draw up this list, might I suggest that it would be helpful for nominators, when a story is rejected, to receive an email indicating reasons simply from such a numbered list. “This story was not selected, because 1 and 3”, for example, with an additional “other reason” as a catch-all. This would entail almost no increase in workload for Curation, but would be extremely helpful for us as nominators, since we may sometimes submit pieces which we feel are less than outstanding in two or three particular areas, but nonetheless as a whole feel like they are “boostworthy”. If they are rejected, it would be great to know whether our misgivings coincide with the curator’s perception or not.

I have to say that the points made here do not really help explain the more perplexing decisions that I have seen, both with my nominations of other writers’ work, and my own pieces that I know have been submitted but rejected. Ultimately, I think we simply have to chalk those instances down to issues of subjectivity. Frustrating, but then what aspect of life isn’t?

By way of example, I still struggle to see why these two pieces of mine, which I know were nominated but rejected, failed to make the grade. I consider them to be at least as worthy as other pieces of mine which have been boosted, and some of my successful submissions of other writers’ stories.

https://medium.com/seroxcats-salon/the-absence-of-the-swallows-a-tale-of-enduring-guilt-9c423bc6af3f

https://medium.com/three-imaginary-girls/how-a-time-travelling-phone-booth-made-musical-history-0ab0d60da2af

I am not asking for any opinion on these from you or from Curation, but merely cite them as examples which I do not believe in any way to fall foul of the criteria mentioned in this article. In these two cases, I think the answer is simply that they didn’t quite strike the same chord with the curator as with the editor (and myself!). And more often than not, that is probably the ultimate reason, and is not one which can be clearly defined or categorised.

Thanks again for taking the time to gather and set out the information contained in this article.