Mini Fest Statistics

[swissmarg]

This year's mini_fest is over and the reveals and master list have been posted.

Fest community: mini_fest 
Fest type: Open prompts
Premise: Christmas/Yule/Solstice/Winter Holiday
Ratings restrictions: None, all ratings allowed
Length restrictions: Minimum 500 words, no maximum
Creation period: 3 and a half months

There were 33 fics and 10 artworks created for the fest by 36 authors and artists. The mods included 3 fics from their July challenge in their master list, but I only counted the fics written for the Holiday fest, which is why their totals are different than mine.

Most prolific: leochi created 4 artworks.
alafaye and kitty_fic wrote 2 fics each. moonlitdark and vividescent created 2 artworks each.

Ratio of art to fic: 30%

There were a total of 71,182 words written for the fest.

Mean (average fic length): 2,157 words
Median (half the fics shorter, half the fics longer): 1,500 words
Mode (most frequent word count): 1-2K

By rating:

FIC
G - iiii
PG - iiiii
PG-13 - iiiii iiiii iiiii
R - iii
NC-17 - iiiii i

ART
G - iii
PG - iiiii i
PG-13 - i

Most popular pairings:

Draco/Harry - 15
Harry/Severus - 5
Remus/Sirius - 4
Hermione/Ron - 2

By alignment:
Note that some fics had more than one pairing.

Slash - 30
Gen - 9
Het - 8
Femslash - 0
Slash Threesome - 1
Het Threesome - 1

By word count:

500-1000 - iiiii iiii
1-2K - iiiii iiiii iii
2-3K - ii
3-4K - iiii
4-5K - iii
5-6K - 0
6-7K - i
7-8K - 0
8K+ - i

Art Media:
Note that some art had more than one medium.

Coloured pencils - i
Digital - ii
Gouache - i
Ink - ii
Watercolours - iiii

Some thoughts: There was a surprisingly large amount of art created for this fest. This is mainly due to the fact that of the 5 artists, 3 created multiple pieces.

The ratings covered the full range, although the scales were tipped in favor of the lower ratings, with 73% of the fics and all of the art rated PG-13 or lower. Regarding the art ratings, I felt that several if not most of the pieces were rated too high. I don't see anything PG (as opposed to G) about any of  leochi's pieces, for example. Maybe they always give their art a standard PG rating.

Draco/Harry was the runaway favorite pairing of this fest, with 35% of the entries featuring them. The next favorite pairings, Harry/Severus and Remus/Sirius, are likewise fandom favorites.

The only canon pairing featured was Hermione/Ron, and that was only in two fics. However, there were also several entries, both fic and art, based on Prompt #5: Christmas 1980: I'd love to see snapshots of the various HP families at this time of year - particularly the Potters, Longbottoms, and Malfoy's celebrating their baby's first Christmases in the shadow of the looming war. I counted all of these as Gen, although they all included mentions or depictions of the canon pairings of James/Lily, Alice/Frank, and Lucius/Narcissa.

Going along with the popularity of Draco/Harry, slash pairings in general completely blew away any other pairing alignment or gen. In fact, there was even more gen than het, although as noted above, many of the 'gen' fics did include het couples.

The word count distribution was pretty typical, with most of the fics being on the low end (67% being less than 2,000 words long), and a smaller number of longer fics, with one clearly longer than the rest (although not by all that much). Given the relatively long creation period, I actually would have expected a couple of much longer fics (up to 20,000 words, perhaps even longer), although perhaps the fact that this was a 'Mini Fest' encouraged authors to keep their word counts generally low.

Watercolours were the favored medium, used in 40% of the artworks. This is, however, due to the fact that the most prolific artist in the fest, leochi, is a watercolour artist.

Comments

[red-day-dawning.livejournal.com]

Interesting stats!
One thing that may have contributed to shorter story lengths is that the minimum is 500 words, rather than the standard 1000 word minimum - part of the "stress-free" aspect of mini-fest.

[swissmarg]

True, but then hp_darkfest had no minimum length, only 2 months to write, was an open prompt fest with no pressure to finish, and still ended up with 4 fics longer than 10,000 words (and of those, 2 longer than 20K). samhain_smut also had a 500 word minimum, only 2 months to write, and had 2 fics over 10,000 words, one of which was 35K (although it was an exchange, so that's a bit different). I'm just saying those are the typical patterns for a fest like this. Something else that may have contributed to relatively low word counts here is that there were many other fests and exchanges running in the same time period, and many of the authors and artists were creating for multiple fests.

[red-day-dawning.livejournal.com]

It's the knowledge that there is no expectation for longer fics that had me signing up for mini-fest, the first fest I've participated in for two years.

[sesheta-66.livejournal.com]

Yay stats! Thanks for doing this, by the way. It's always interesting to see things from a statistical perspective.

[swissmarg]

Thank you, glad you got a kick out of it. :)