Well, I feel a little bad even commenting considering I defaulted. (On the other hand, my intended recip got a 50k fic and I wasn't planning anything of that length or scope so I almost feel like I did them a favor? I was going to write them an extra fic late as an apology anyway...when the same filler also wrote their other requested ship in a fic of similar length and I thought...you know I think they had a better time on this exchange than they would have if I'd written for them like I was supposed to.)

But out of curiosity with the art, what did it look like in terms of people offering vs. people requesting art? Was there a shortage of art offers, art requests, or both? I've signed up as both artist and writer twice, and always gotten writing-only assignments, though that's just anecdata.

Eyeballing it, I'd say 1/3 of requests included art and all included fic, and about 10% offered art, but that's an impression. I haven't actually crunched numbers. I think the requests might be up a bit from last year, but the offers seem pretty similar?

Interesting! If all requested art, and all or most requested fic, it's probably easier for the system to match on, unless it's prioritized like the rare fandoms are. And if someone who requested art or fic is matched to someone who offered art or fic, assuming no bias at all you'd still only get art 50% of the time, so that might contribute to art fills being less than art signups. 10% of people offering for art minus those who got assigned fic-only requests minus 50% of whatever percentage of the remainder who signed up for fic only, it seems like it'd be a small number.

I'm not entirely sure what could be done to increase that. You're already on tumblr. ....Deviantart? There are some femslash groups on there, if you could get promoed by any of them it might get the word out some. I had the kind of wacky idea that you could do an art-only femslashex fest six months away from the main one, as a way to like...court people intimidated by fic I guess? But if there just aren't people signing up, I don't know that there'd be enough people for there to be a point in it, plus it's literally twice the work.

It seems odd to me, as femslash fandom is kind of famous for being more visual and having a lot of its content in art and vids rather than fic.

Though as a random suggestion, a lot of artists are in anime fandoms (people who draw like looking at drawings) so it might be a little bit useful to add anime-favored femslash tags on tumblr posts, such as "yuri," "girls love," "gl" or "shoujo ai."

I don't know how the matching machine works. I expects it matches the people with only one possible match first, and then sorts everyone else out. I've heard that it skews towards matching people on more than one thing if possible, but idk if that's true.

I'll look into deviant art. I don't really know the culture there, but I probably have an account somewhere. I don't think modly energy extends to another fest, though I suppose there could be a tumblr one like the secret santas that are going on now, but I shudder to think of it without the matching engine, and I think it's mostly AO3 that's scaring people off.

Good thought about tagging. I'll try that when I'm advertising next round. Thank you for all your input.

I do agree that the matching system is probably part of it. People who want art often match on folks who only write, and people who want to draw match on requests for for fic only. I am very meta in my signups, so I actually only requested fic in two out of six fandoms, and those were the tiny ones with 0-1 offers. Still got fic. :)

(Not that I didn't want fic, I just like to encourage the things I see less of. My tiny fandom gift was awesome.) But I suspect the matching algorithm is not weighted to come up a variety of media like the way it tries not match everyone on the five juggernaut fandoms. Not much you could do about that part.



Edited 2015-11-10 07:19 pm (UTC)

wow typing fail, my second sentence makes no sense. How did I screw it up that badly? Anyway, I was trying to say something about how if everyone requests fic and all or most offer fic then it's easier to match on that than on the art.