SteemShorts are short stories written collaboratively by three different authors and illustrated by an artist/photographer, on the 
society account.
For each of the three parts of the stories, authors are submitting summaries of their proposals and one of them is chosen by the readers to write the complete part. Similarly, when the story has been completely written, illustrators are proposing pictures and one of them is chosen.
The process to choose the authors/illustrators was initially described in this post: SteemShorts: Collaborative Short Stories.
When we conceived SteemShorts, we thought that readers would select the proposals based only on the quality of the summaries. However, this is not what happened. For each of the three SteemShorts that has been written so far, the different chosen authors have been those that have the biggest number of friends that voted for them, regardless of the quality of their proposals.
So, we have come to the conclusion that the proposals should be anonymous and that the best one should be chosen by a jury that will see only the proposals and will not know which author/illustrator has made the proposal.
Secret proposals, selected by a jury
For each of the three parts of the story, authors will send 0.001 STEEM or SBD to the 
Three days after the request for one part of the story, the different valid proposals will be sent to the members of the jury that will decide which one is chosen, based only on the quality of the proposals.
A similar process will be used for the illustration: the URL of the proposed illustration will be put in the secret memo to
The jury will not know what author/illustrator has made the proposals, so that only the quality of the proposals will be taken into account.
We are confident that these new rules will increase the quality of the future SteemShorts.