Ledgers and Sledges

There's a discussion at the Ledger forum about, well, the Ledgers and what can be fixed and what can be left alone.

And since i have very little going on, I'm going to prattle on about my suggestions for the next couple of days.

Categories

I'm probably not the only one who thought there were too many categories. With 19 categories it would either scare of people by its size or people faced with the idea of trying to think of who is the best letterer or inker just give up.

Even though I won it and I'm thankful i still don't understand how "Person of the Year" differs from "Achievement of the Year"; i think it would be better if it was amalgamated into the one category.

I think Design, cover artist, inker, colourist and letterer should be amalgamated into a single Art Design category. What you could do is on the nomination form (if nominations are suggestions made by the public) have a field where nominators state the field they are nominating a creator for; "Mark Selan - Design" and the final list of nominees shows this
"Karen Howard - Design
"L. Frank Weber - Cover Art
Doug Holgate - Inking
Annette Kwok - Colouring"
This gives a good guage of what people are recognising - if in a couple of years time, a number of inkers are nominated then they can get their own category. This'll stop people 'needing' to think of three names and then most likely nominating people on name recognition.

Whilst i like the idea of recognising Retailers for their work, especially the good ones, i feel that unless some other method is used to pick a winner, we may as well alternate yearly between Phase 2 and Kings. Though the two are great it doesn't help they both have large markets to vote for them.

I've been shrieking that Small Press and Independent Press needs guidelines. A book with nominations split over 2 categories may miss being included in the final tally due to confusion of its category.
For example
5 people nominate Knightsedge for Indy Press
5 people nominate Knightsedge for Small Press
Gary has 10 moninations in total albeit spread over 2 categories.
In the small press category though - the 3 highest books have votes of 9,8,7 so gary is out of the running for small press
in the indy press category - the 3 highest books are 8,7,6
Gary is out of the running in both categories even though he has more nominations. Sure everyone is in the same boat but those books that MAY be in both will suffer the most.

Otherwise I think the Ledger of Honour is great, we need to recognise the past and its creators. Same with New Talent category though it may be nice if there was some guidelines on what constitutes new talent would be helpful. But no biggie.

Finally, I'm not sure if comic strip is all that necessary since most webcomics are essentially comic strips anyway.


So
Achievement of the Year
Artist of the Year
Writer of the Year
New talent deserving recognition
Small Press title of the year
Independent Press title of the year
International Press title of the year
Anthology of the year
Strip of the year
Single Story of the year
Design of the Year
Retailer of the Year
Ledger of Honour

So down to 13 categories.