#Sleepers - Promoting Great Articles that Never Woke Up - Proposal

We've all seen great articles that just seem to fall to the wayside, getting less notice than a barnacle. A couple of folks are helping these writers in various ways, including @gavvet with his nice opportunities for new arrivals and @stellabelle with her anonymous series. There are groups trying to make a difference too, like @robinhoodwhale, #minnowsunite and #steemteam. Check them out.

This idea came about as a result of Barry Cooper's recent article where he talks about the challenge of seeing good writers go unrecognized. And there's also a group of larger fish that try to get together to help some of us less known authors as well. You know they found you when all of a sudden you have a home run. I had suggested to Barry to do something like this, but then figured I should put my post where my mouth is.

To be sure, not everyone is a good writer. There are some folks with good ideas that just don't convey them well. And their are much rilly bad grammer and speeling hear. We all make mistakes, but it should be the exception. If folks want to be recognized, it would be best to clean these up first.

I'm not exactly a big fish here, so maybe my effort won't count for much. But I'm willing to give it a shot. Let's face it, it's a big overstocked pond. So how about a promotion of the great articles that fly under the radar? The idea would be to wait until close to their second payout, then write an introduction to the article along with a link so followers could go read it for themselves and upvote in it's last hours if they agree that it deserved more Steemit hugs.

We could also have a chat room to discuss these among those who wanted to be involved.

• If you think it's a good idea, please say so below. If you have better ideas of how it could be done, add that to your comments please.

• Judges - If you're interested in participating, please say so here in the comments and start your reply with @JUDGE to help make them stand out. If you support that person being a judge, please reply accordingly to their post. If there are a lot of takers, then we'll take the ten that get the most votes in the comments. More than that might become unmanageable.

• Payout proposal - 50% of the SD from the sleeper post is awarded to the author. In the event that ST is awarded (which could happen if the ST price drops a lot), then 50% of the ST will be awarded to the author. 10% will go to whomever suggests the article first (curators are already working on articles). The rest (40%) will be divided evenly among the judges (not including me), for their efforts. This will only be on the first payout after it's posted. Of course, the original author also gets to keep all of whatever comes their way, so you can just move your love there to promote them directly.

In order for this to be a success, the quality needs to be really good. With this in mind, here are some suggestions on how this could work. Please share insights that I've missed or ideas that might work better.

• Assessment of the article - After some discussion, the judges will narrow down the field to five articles. Each of the following factors will be graded on a scale of 1-10 by the ten judges (100 being the max score). All five will be listed in a weekly post (for now) with their scores. The winner will have a brief description of their article and maybe some comments from the judges. These might not be the best categories, but it's a start.

1. Content/Topic (Obviously Steemit posts will be passed)
2. Originality
3. Readability
4. Grammar/Spelling
5. Structure/Impression (layout, feel, intangibles, etc)

To suggest an article, the following should be met (instructions on where to submit articles will be in the next Sleeper update). Any user that fails to do this once will be ignored. Not to be rude, but the idea is to look for good discernment and work, not just find a bunch of articles. If this is successful, weeding through them will be a ton of work:

1. Assess the writer's success rate, to make sure they're not just having an "off" article. If their other articles are netting over $50, move on.
2. Do not promote your own articles. That should be self-explanatory.
3. They should have posted at least 10 articles. It doesn't have to be the tenth one, but they need enough history to assess their track record.
4. Article must be less than 1,500 words. Yes, many great articles are more, but the amount of time it would take to read long ones to promote would be exhausting. This just makes it more manageable, and can be adjusted as necessary.
5. Article must have made less than $50 and first payout has ended.

I know I'm not the first to try something like this. Maybe someone else is doing it that we should throw our support behind. I'm totally open to whatever works. But I figured I'd toss this out there and see if it sticks. What do you think?

Steemin' on,
Another Joe

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