I’m sorry I have a difficult time understanding… They announced the contest in March. You had until the end of July. That’s 18 weeks for you to write your story and develop your reach. The time from the deadline until the winner announcement (around 4 weeks) is what I assume to be the marking period.
Episode reviews your story even before that marking period, my story was reviewed shortly after I published it which was 2 weeks before the deadline… Another point to make, shouldn’t reviewing also go hand in hand with the marking? It practically has the same guidelines. To my understanding, those stories who haven’t been reviewed before the deadline, would be reviewed alongside the marking.
By the way you can you reference where you read that the DL contest would be 8 weeks? I’m having a hard time finding it.
I apologize, I could have sworn I saw in the rules at announcement that they were extending the review period to 8 weeks due to the extended chapter requirement, I just went back and read it, it was 3-6 weeks after deadline. My mistake.
It’s really frustrating tbh the last time I entered a contest, I wasn’t reviewed by episode before the winners were announced So I’m kinda worried it’ll be the case this time as well
Yes! It’s the first contest I’ve joined actually but I’m confused by the things behind that. I mean 100 reads at least or being top 100 in the genre if I got that right. So why was there a day where I was 299 in the genre and gain during the day about ten more reads and it stayed at 299 the whole time? And other days where I gain only 3 reads and it goes from something like +700 to about 300? I don’t know how these are calculated but it somehow doesn’t seem to make any sense… Well at least it does not for me
It’s easier to go up the lower you are in ranks. The higher you get up the more competitive it is. That’s why sometimes people can get x amount of reads/gems and go up 200 spots and other times they only go up 10. It’s a lot more competitive in the top 100 than it is in the top 200 for example.
Wait, so is there even a way to get to the top 100 without gems? Like my story doesn’t support gems, so I’d need more than way to many reads per day then?
Yeah, that’s actually never gonna happen, it seems impossible now for me to ever win a contest that way. I don’t want to change anything so I guess more and more readers over a long time should be enough for me
Well, I have more than 100 reads, I’m actually waiting for my story to be reviewed. I just have to hope that’ll happen before the winners are going to be announced.
But anyway, thanks for informing me about these things!
Then I hope you get the review! Just please be aware your story also has to have the right engagement too. A lot of people think it’s only about the reads when it’s not.
Totally get what you mean. The ranking is really inconsistent at times. My story is in the genre Romance, I was on rank 101 for a few times and I was even on rank 88 for some hours and sometimes between 91-97. And by now I have almost 1k reads. I think that should be enough reason for them to review the story, but still nothing happens
it might have gotten reviewed, because i got reviewed on the 8th of october already but never received an email or notification about it on the portal. i emailed episode regarding it because i was trending in the top 10 even, to make sure i indeed got reviewed and they emailed me back telling me the date my story was reviewed.