Event Shelves & Recommendations

Announcements!
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Hi everyone!

As many of you already know, we ask the larger community for story recommendations on Instagram to feature on our shelves in the app. We really appreciate all of your enthusiasm and input, and we thought this would be a good time to put together some best practices for recommending stories. None of these are hard rules, but they’ll definitely help you find the stories and authors we’re looking for overall.

Published stories only, please
We ask that everyone focus on suggesting stories that have already been published by the date of your recommendation. Keep an eye out for future shelves that could use those stories, and don’t hesitate to suggest them when the time comes. That will give the stories and authors you mention the best chance of being featured on a future shelf!

Short and sweet
While we love knowing that your current favorite stories just keep adding more chapters, we have limited time to review your recommendations before our event shelves go up. While there is no specific maximum number of chapters a featured story can have, we’re less likely to be able to review stories with 20 chapters or more in time for them to be featured.

Calling all new authors
Each event shelf is a chance for authors to have their work showcased. Every author deserves their moment in the spotlight, so we’d really like to see stories that have not been featured before! We encourage you to keep recommending lesser-known authors to us and to point out stories that have been featured before if they are recommended. Though not every shelf will have brand new authors on it, our Hidden Gems shelves are our opportunity to specifically focus on smaller, up-and-coming authors who haven’t been featured before, to bring attention to their talent and hard work!

Commissioned authors
As many of you know, we have a group of talented authors who work with us on Episode Originals and are always looking out for authors to join our Commissions Program! To keep the event shelves community author-centric, and to give smaller authors the chance to reach a wider audience, we’d like to see authors who haven’t already released a commissioned story for or had a story purchased by Episode recommended. Keep suggesting your favorite community reads so we can showcase their work!

Fresh is best
Since there are so many talented writers in our community, new content is always being published, and while we love a throwback to earlier days, we feel that the Episode community is best represented by its newer content. With that in mind, we prefer to feature stories from around the last 24 months to keep things fresh and showcase active authors so you can get the best experience when reading.

Spamming Doesn’t Change Your Chances
Having a bunch of people spam the post for one particular story will not increase its chances of getting featured over others. Having 100+ comments on a single post for a singular story can actually make our Shelf Curation Team’s work even more challenging to find all of the other stories being listed. We truly do our best to consider every story recommended to us if they fit the theme of the Shelf Call, so we’d love to see everyone try and highlight as many different stories as they can.

If you have questions or want more clarification, please don’t hesitate to ask!

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Out of interest, does the more recommendations you get increase your chances or could being recommended once still give you a chance too? :blush:

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I have been thinking for a while and have a question/suggestion @Tory:

I have seen lot’s of African, Asian - American, Pacific, etc. author shelves, but not one has been dedicated to European authors. :smiling_face_with_tear:
It would be cool if you could considerate East European shelf, North European shelf, etc. :slightly_smiling_face:
As an author from Europe this is important to me and a lot more authors on Episode too!
It would be a chance to get a lot small authors as a big part of the community are not from America or Asia.

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I am just curios and no hate but do you thinks its fair for authors to be on a shelve more then once? I know it not authors fault when they are up more than once but I am just really curious.

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This is brilliant to hear, but I do have a question… if you’re able to answer it?! @Tory

Last year, Episode reached out to someone I know in the community [via Instagram] as they wanted to feature her story on a shelf… but she had to make changes, first.
She didn’t get the message until later on, because it was filtered into her spam. Luckily she eventually saw it.

But… what happens if someone doesn’t get the messages at all?! Perhaps if their Instagram settings are set to “don’t receive” [for non followers] for example?! Would Episode try to reach out via email, instead?!

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I agree with a lot of what’s here, but want to highlight this section. I seriously think more needs to be done in terms of not shelving stories that haven’t been updated for months on end. A year or so ago there were multiple stories being shelved that one could very easily look and see hadn’t been updated in 5+ months. Is there anyway Episode can implement a system for only featuring stories that are actively being updated (as in within the last 2-3 months)? It’s very frustrating when people writing active stories get passed over for stories that haven’t been updated in over a year.
@Tory

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I see what you’re saying, but please remember why these shelves exist. Typical popular authors are straight, white women who write about straight, white women. These shelves help celebrate the smaller, marginalized communities who have historically had to sacrifice their cultures to appeal to white people, like Black, Asian, Latine, and LGBT authors who aren’t as popular for writing characters like themselves. There are plenty of shelves outside of these for the general public.

Also, there is no shelf for Americans. Asian-American is one thing, though it really applies to any Asian or Pacific Islander.

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But do these straight, white woman doesn’t deserve something too? I mean the ones that are new authors. There are soo many white authors who are trying to get noticed too. Myself and a lot of my friends can’t enter almost none of those as we’re not from these countries, races. I’m not trying to be rude, but white authors need a bit recognition too.

I know, I just couldn’t remember which one exactly. :sweat_smile:

P.S. I take everything like this because of my hormones, so just don’t mind me.

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Being recommended once would give you the same chance of being featured on a shelf as someone who was mentioned multiple times as long as they fit the theme of the shelf we’ve put a call out for. Having a bunch of people spam the post for one story does make it harder to find all of the other great stories that people recommend, so we’d love to see everyone try and highlight as many different stories as they can.

We’re working on something to gather suggestions for themes.

Like appearing on multiple shelves or appearing on the same shelf multiple times? Just trying to make sure I’m understanding.

So, we actually start by reaching out via email. We send a message on IG only if we get no reply to a request for edits. The key thing here is making sure you check the email tied to your portal account and also checking spam. We do know that some of our emails for edit requests end up in spam for some email providers.

We truly appreciate authors like you putting in the effort to constantly publish new content! We do our best to feature stories that are currently being actively updated; however, we also understand that some authors with multiple ongoing stories might choose to prioritize one over another for a period of time, or life may get in the way and require authors to take time away from Episode. The quality of a story is our main focus, and we know that writing and coding can take a very long time.

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I’m not saying they don’t. I’m saying there are opportunities for all authors and they take the majority of those spots because the majority of readers fit that demographic as well. It’s much harder for a POC author to write about a POC character with their culture and get recognition for their story. I do hope it’s not too much to ask that we get one shelf per year.

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Community has changed a lot. That’s one of the reasons why little authors (black, white, etc.) don’t get much attention.
But as Tory answered, they’re thinking about new shelves. :smiley:

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Well sure. I’m not trying to attack or challenge your ideas, so apologies if that’s what my tone conveyed. I tend to write wayy to formally lol. The main thing I’m saying is that when you say “a lot of shelves” are dedicated toward these groups, it kinda rubs me the wrong way since it really is 1 each per year. Black History Month is February, Women’s History Month is March, AAPI Heritage Month is May, Pride Month is June. So I can see why it may seem like a lot since they’re all clustered together, but Episode has 2 event shelves up at a time, so there’s always at least one free shelf. If you want a European shelf that’s all good and well, but the way you phrased your request just kinda seemed dismissive of the reason behind these shelves. Just my two cents.

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Don’t worry. I appreciate your opinion! And sorry if I seem like a little b*tch too. :sweat_smile: I promise I’m not.

And you’re probably right. I really feel like there a lot of shelves all the time. Time passes too fast. :smiling_face_with_tear:

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@rogueangelwrites @KikiMoon I think she means ethnicity as well. For example, there was an Arab-American shelf I believe. And they are technically white I believe, so…if she’s say Polish or Romanian or Syrian…This is where this kinda stuff gets slippery. Plus, I think her American point is that episode is a global app, most of the shelves focus on American-centric categories and holidays. That’s all. But you both definitely have points. Like it’s Asian American month not Asian-Canadian or Or Asian-Peruvian. I think there is validity in recognizing this is not an app with just an American audience.

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Thank you for your response, @Tory and for clearing this up. :blob_hearts: I’m glad that there’s more than one type of contact. And I can confirm that you’re correct… sometimes the emails do get sent to spam.

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Honestly, practically all celebrations that are celebrated in America or Asia are not in my country. Would be cool if Episode could celebrate a few of none-American celebrations. :thinking:

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Ooh yes, I agree. I am American myself so I don’t recognize that as easily, but I see what you mean now.

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Yes, exactly. That’s all. For example, they could look at the demographics and pick and choose some large ones that might capture a lot of people. I think celebrating some Indian holidays or events would be well-received as it appears to me (of course I don’t have the data, this is just observation from my episode community interactions, so take it with a grain of salt), that many writers and readers are from India, for example.

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They don’t celebrate Asian holidays as far as I’m aware. We just get the one shelf for all Asians, including Indians. But I definitely see the point with the whole American thing. It’s the same with non-American spellings of things getting marked as a spelling error in the writer’s portal. It does seem less inclusive toward non-American authors.

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