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Topic: AO's Guide to Maximizing Your Odds of Getting Your Document Read  (Read 4668 times)

Acierocolotl

  • Romance Supremacist
  • Ridiculist
  • You will be romanticized
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It is a highlight of my week to look into the "pending" file and see new documents waiting to be checked out.  We on the Ridiculist side of this podcast love all the stuff you send us, even if it's a money sink for Lemon (which you guys generously help defray by being Ballpit members, thank you again).

I was having a bit of a chat about some of the upcoming episodes we've got in the pipe when I was struck by melancholic pains about those submissions we rejected, because I know how much work went into those things.  I've personally collected material for a decent number of the earlier recordings (some of them failures you won't ever hear), and I know from first-hand experience how much of a pain in the ass it is.  I've been there, I empathize, and I want you all to succeed.  I abhor waste.

It's that hatred of waste that compels me to write a guide to help you lovely submitters out.  This is just a guide, there's always some wiggle room of course, but hopefully it'll shed some insight on the thought processes that go into making your submision as attractive to me as possible,  and that's going to really up your odds of producing a winner.

Seriously folks, I read all your documents, every last one.  I don't read them deeply, though, I skim them so I'm always earnestly surprised at what comes up if I'm on the cast for that particular episode.  What's happening here, in summary, is that I have a pretty surface treatment of the document and I'm relying on gut feelings.

Before you start, though, you should read Montrith's excellent guide on the general form of a submission, which is stickied in this subforum.  If you've read it previously, it doesn't hurt to review it again, it will help get the general structure and format down and give a slicker presentation.


Now, firstly, your introduction should be two paragraphs at the most.  The first paragraph is where you introduce yourself, so we've got handy information to make sure Lemon gives you the Internet fame you deserve when we read your document.

The second paragraph (if you feel it needs one) should be a standard, five-sentence paragraph at the most.  The podcast is aimed at a general audience, so if it takes more than a paragraph to explain what's up, it may be too abstract to be funny to a lot of people.  If you really need to explain the humour in advance, it might not work.  I mean I'm an idiot (I'm getting my handler to type this for me), so bear that in mind--humour that's too abstract or high brow may just confuse or enrage me.

Your very, very next entry should be something that punches me right in my fucking stupid face.  I'm not kidding, dig up the funniest thing from your topic and put it right on the top, right there, right where I'll see it.  Hook me.  Make me go "holy shit, what did I just read?" and have to quell the urge to cut-and-paste it to random strangers on my friendslist.  You want to start things as hot as you can.

Our general podcast structure is to have something outrageous at the front to spike interest, cool it off for awhile with funny-but-decent material, and then ramp up to a hilarious conclusion.  If your document follows that structure, you are a superstar heavyweight champion of the F+ boxing world.  Punch hard right away, put the so-so stuff in the middle, and then ramp it up to an exciting knockout combo at the end.

Consider the Valentine's episode, which I think is a perfect example.  The first thing we read was this hideously gross business about an awful, foul-smelling, sweaty, disturbingly overweight woman extorting booger-laden sex from a man with a small penis, seguing into more conventional (but badly written) sex stories, and escalating to Bunny Bread's weird reading of aryan supremacist nazi-pubes car-monster cockogy madness.


Secondly, it has absolutely got to be readable.  That means a lot of things:

--Written text:  The vast majority of the material should be written text, be it forum posts, some lunatic's website, or weird ramblings on a miniscule wiki for instance.  If the majority of the humour comes from images, we can't really do justice to it trying to describe the action.  Neither can we work from somebody else's audio, even if it's a transcription of a total fruit basket's radio show.

--Formatting:  I'm dumb, I'll lose my place, I need paragraphs and whitespace to give my stupid eyes a chance to "breathe".  It's okay to neaten up the content a bit so that it all fits on the screen properly.  Sometimes the arbitrary carriage returns in the original are funny to read, but making the text look neat will make it easier for us.

--Keep the font, font size and colour consistent:  You don't need to add emphasis to anything in the submission.  Funny things you see on a screen will be differently funny than something read aloud or performed vocally.  A lot of our humour comes from spontaneous riffing, so it's best just to let the document speak for itself.  So what I mean is keep the font plain and consistent.  If the original text had weird changes (the Twilight roleplay episode comes to mind: AMERICA!), it's okay to keep those, but don't add your own, please.  12 point font, black text, white background, no underlines, bold, italics, etc.  Segment, chapter or content separators are another matter, are as URLs, do what you like there (within reason).

Speaking of URLs, always provide those please.  There might have been something you missed, and I know Kumquatxop (amongst others) is proficient at digging up the weirdest little gems you might have missed, which caught his fancy right at that moment.

--Be sure you've shared it with us.  SHARE IT WITH [email protected].  You must do this.  Go ahead and make him able to make edits, I guarantee we'll not touch your document, we just want to look at it.  If you don't, he can't share it with the rest of us, we can't read it, and I'll have to turn it down sight unseen, and I can't think of a sadder way to end an otherwise brilliant document.

--Duration:  Even your middle-of-the-document has got to be punchy.  We read at maybe 100 words a minute (broadly accounting for interruptions, asides, French Toast puns and penis jokes) so 1,000 words is the upper, serious, do-not-cross limit.  That's at least ten minutes of broadcast time and we can't really read a lot of those in one sitting; if that entry is six screens of a guy's gradually growing insanity, the humour is likely to be lost if we dash through it speedily and miss the best bits.

If you're using a normal font and reasonable margins and it takes up a full page of a google document, you might want to consider the shortest, punchiest portion of that essay, or maybe skip it altogether and consider something else.  Of course there are exceptions, but the few times we read relatively long things (ignoring, say, the first ten episodes we ever made) we had much shorter things in the episode as well.  Variety is the spice of a reading--if you've got some long material, shorter material is definitely welcome.  Generally insane replies to a long forum post (etc.) will count here and can be pretty fun, it lets a lot of Ridiculists have a go at the topic.

--Quality:  If you're hard up to fill an hour, don't succumb to digging up filler.  Maybe somebody else on the Ballpit has material that will work well with it and you could submit a hybrid document?  If that fails, we might be able to staple it to something else and hybridize it ourselves.  Better to be too short and get merged with another than to be filled with too much stuffing and get passed by altogether, I think.

--COPYRIGHT ISSUES:  If it's published material, even if it's free to download from Amazon, we can't read it.  We need to be able to get at it purely with a URL.  Pirated .pdfs we also have to decline, sadly, no matter how hilarious they are.



Finally, let the material speak for itself.  Resist the temptation to add your own snark or bold specific sections to draw our attention.  It's your locomotive (and it's a lovely locomotive), but we're driving it.  If your document includes multiple websites or concepts, a separator and introduction for each is fine if you keep it brief, like a paragraph or something, and that's fantastic! 

That said, if the topic needs your running commentary to be funny, it may not work out in a podcast as well as you might like.  I am 100% certain you're funny but we do want to read the idiots on the webpage, not your commentary no matter how brilliant it is (and you are brilliant, because you had the good taste to listen to us AND consider submitting a document.  I love you for it).


This is going to be a living document, so the flow may be a bit rough and I'll be adding to it and editting it from time to time.  If you have any questions about the process, go ahead and reply here and I'll answer them as promptly as I can.  If you have concerns or you want my opinion on something, go ahead and message me privately if you like, or at this username at gmail.

Thanks again!  This show could not exist without your submissions, and I'm sincerely looking forward to what else comes down the pipe.
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« Last Edit: May 17, 2014, 07:21:43 pm by Acierocolotl »