Well, you didn’t really need to email them as all the information has been stated in forums and linked in the first post of this thread. Not too hard to find, it’s here. 
What is the process of running a contest?
Contest entries go through a bunch of steps to make it to the winners’ shelf in the app. Each story must pass each step in order to make it on to the next one. Once the entry window closes the stories go into a phase of retention testing which allow readers in the app the chance to play through them. This period usually lasts around 7-14 days after which stories move through the following phases:
3. What is the entry’s Reader Retention or Reader Engagement on the first 3 chapters?
Check out our Episode Explained: Reader Retention to learn more about what this is and why we use it. Because the primary goal of contests is to challenge our authors to create stories that our reader community will love, we use reader retention as an objective, numerically based, method to judge reader interest in entry stories. We believe if a higher percentage of players read further into the story, it suggests they enjoy it more. Stories who meet the benchmarks for their first three chapters move on to the next phase. _
- Something to note: Stories must get around 100 reads for the calculations to be statistically valid. From testing we know that if a story does not get at least 100 reads it is unlikely to be a hit with Episode Readers.
Side note to @sealed_stories and @E_Summers: Please try not to spam the thread with multiple posts one after the other. If you forgot to add something or think of something later on, then just edit your post. That way other forumers won’t be bothered by a whole load of notifications when they next login. 