Add your favorite genre/subgenre to CritMatch!

  • Kids Craft Books

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Adult Craft Books

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Erotica

    Votes: 3 23.1%
  • Western

    Votes: 1 7.7%
  • Men's Adventure

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Picture books

    Votes: 1 7.7%
  • Move to a genre/age choice approach

    Votes: 11 84.6%

  • Total voters
    13

Leslie

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Hi all
There has been lots of discussion on the site about our genre choices. We can add more but always want to be sure that we have enough interest to make it useful. I've added a few that were listed in various posts around the site. Please reply to this post with others and I will add them to the poll. I've set this up so you can vote on two. Every week or so, I will move these from here into the match options.

There has also been a suggestion that we modify the match so that you can choose a base genre and an age range. I'd be be interested to learn how many of you think that would be more useful than the subgenre/age combo that we currently have. That was proposed by @John Berkowitz on this thread. It's an interesting idea and I love those! Thanks, John!
 
@John Berkowitz had good suggestions about the main fiction genres then age range we're working with. @JasonWrench also mentioned something I've encountered--not being able to contact critique matches via Savvy IMs. I've not had responses from either of the past two matches and wonder if they aren't participating but forgot to opt out?

 
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@John Berkowitz had good suggestions about the main fiction genres then age range we're working with. @JasonWrench also mentioned something I've encountered--not being able to contact critique matches via Savvy IMs. I've not had responses from either of the past two matches and wonder if they aren't participating but forgot to opt out?

Hi Barbara
Thanks for the feedback. We are also concerned about this. This last match had the highest rate of non-responders that we have ever had. Very disappointing. We're discussing what we can do before the next match to improve this. Some of the things we are considering:
  • Automatically opting people out and requiring that they opt in before the next match
    • Pro: is that you def know that the folks who respond want to participate
    • Con: you will lose people who have missed the email
    • Con: we'll need a bit of development to do this, so likely won't be available before this next match runs
  • Sending out more confirmation emails the week before
    • Pro: it's easy to see if this works
    • Con: it's more of the same, we already send out reminders
  • Review our current list of participants and opt out people who havve not been active in the past month or so.
    • The current issue could be because the Opt-in list is not fresh,
    • Pro: easy and we will do this before the next matcdh
    • Con: none that I can think of.
Always looking for other ways to crack this nut! Please let us know if you think of something that I did not list above.
 
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@John Berkowitz had good suggestions about the main fiction genres then age range we're working with. @JasonWrench also mentioned something I've encountered--not being able to contact critique matches via Savvy IMs. I've not had responses from either of the past two matches and wonder if they aren't participating but forgot to opt out?

Same. Two matches, and no response from either one.
 
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Same. Two matches, and no response from either one.
Thanks for letting us know. If you have any other suggestions that the ones above, we'd be delighted to hear them
 
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Thanks for letting us know. If you have any other suggestions that the ones above, we'd be delighted to hear them
There are a lot of pros and cons to the various suggestions, above. I wonder if it might be easiest to just wipe out everyone and send a new e-mail telling everyone who wants to participate to sign up again with the fresh categories (which we would have to do anyway, right?), then continue going forward as before. That should weed out those that have lost interest or signed up and forgotten about it.
 
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There are a lot of pros and cons to the various suggestions, above. I wonder if it might be easiest to just wipe out everyone and send a new e-mail telling everyone who wants to participate to sign up again with the fresh categories (which we would have to do anyway, right?), then continue going forward as before. That should weed out those that have lost interest or signed up and forgotten about it.
That is exactly what we did. You should have received an email from Dawn yesterday with updated information. This morning I opted out everyone. We have pushed the next match run until June 6 both to let everyone opt back in and because I am on vacation next week. :)

Thanks!
 
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That is exactly what we did. You should have received an email from Dawn yesterday with updated information. This morning I opted out everyone. We have pushed the next match run until June 6 both to let everyone opt back in and because I am on vacation next week. :)

Thanks!
That's awesome! Actually, I didn't receive an e-mail, but I'll go opt in right now!
 
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Is there a way to see whether an opt-in has "taken"? I go to the page, make selections for the three questions, click Save, and then nothing more happens. So I have no way of knowing whether I have successfully "opted in" or not.
Yes, if your changes are persisted, you should see the checkboxes checked and your options saved. Let me know if this does not work for you.
Thanks!
 
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Just to be insane and troublesome, I CHANGED MY GENRE this time. :D:ROFLMAO:;)
Seriously, the WIP I need help with right now is in the paranormal romance genre, and there's only one other "Romance (other sub)" person, so I clicked and it shows that I am the second one now. It looks like that worked and saved and I'm opted in as the genre I want to be opted in with.
That sentence makes no sense, I'm sure. (I'm multi-tasking this morning)
Anyway...this post is saying: "Hey...I think this worked."
I'm looking forward to June 6th!
I'm looking forward to critting with a fellow crazed writer!
With more of us participating, I think this will show us "how well" this is going to work out overall.
 
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So, this time I finally got a match who responded (first time). However we are not a match. I originally selected "MG," then changed it to "Fantasy" several weeks ago when I saw only 4 people were registered for MG. The person I was matched with had selected "Children's Books."

This perfectly illustrates the issue I've been talking about. I have written a middle grade fantasy, and she writes picture books. So even if I had chosen "Children's Books" (which MG is technically part of), we were about as far apart as we could possibly be.
 
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So, this time I finally got a match who responded (first time). However we are not a match. I originally selected "MG," then changed it to "Fantasy" several weeks ago when I saw only 4 people were registered for MG. The person I was matched with had selected "Children's Books."

This perfectly illustrates the issue I've been talking about. I have written a middle grade fantasy, and she writes picture books. So even if I had chosen "Children's Books" (which MG is technically part of), we were about as far apart as we could possibly be.
Yea, I write Romance, chose HIst Romance, and was paired with a mystery which I never selected. This is the second rotation where something I did not select matched me, the first one was right and we continue to trade files. Posting to let you know, that you aren't the only one that was messed up. I sent in an email about it.
 
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Thanks for all the feedback! And special thanks to @mizard who uncovered a bug! YAY! Well sort of YAY, anyway. It is now fixed and that will not be a problem going forward. We are making changes to the match algorithm but those wont be available for the next match. I am going to start a new thread with our proppsed changes so you can provide feedback.
Thank you all for the great comments!
 
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@John Berkowitz had good suggestions about the main fiction genres then age range we're working with. @JasonWrench also mentioned something I've encountered--not being able to contact critique matches via Savvy IMs. I've not had responses from either of the past two matches and wonder if they aren't participating but forgot to opt out?

I found my emails in my spam folder.
 
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