Thank you very much for your support and sharing this initiative! I want to believe that if this gets enough attention then change can be brought to the system!
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I agree but at the end of the day everyone is still free to enter a contest, anyway you should be writing because you love it, of course you want recognition but it doesnāt happen over night.
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I agree and I donāt want to discourage popular authors either. I just want to balance the two so that on the one hand popular authors donāt feel discriminated as their stories are good and deserve to be featured, but on the other hand their popularity just completely outshines emerging authors which shouldnāt happen either.
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I added it to a thread. Canāt remember which but it got a ton of likes.
Agreed, but this doesnāt go to you, but it doesnāt feel nice being labelled recognised, even though I am not, because I have a few views on my story, I still worked as much as everyone else, it is just about pure luck. Episode should actually feature this, perhaps it would encourage more readers to become writers! 
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Iāve been reading for a few years before I started writing and the reason for that was because I really liked the contest theme. While I do believe my story is quite good I just see so many other discouraged emerging authors whose stories are amazing and who suffer from unfairly low reads. Such contests for them should be a chance to be heard and I can see that this is not happening and that upsets me deeply as well.
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I totally support this. And it doesnāt have anything to do with my entry to the contest. I believe there were so many amazing stories that I was absolutely sure would make it to the shelf, but they didnāt. And yeah of course they had less reds than those that wonā¦ I really like your idea of blind contest, Alex. And I totally think that Episode should consider either this, or two shelves of winners. Or find some other way of doing it. So support 100%
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Thank you very much for your support!
The blind contest idea belongs to @PerplexedJam and I also believe that it has a lot of potential. We just need to figure out the IG promotion issue.
If you could also spread the word about the initiative that would also really help!
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The post I was replying to I think meant 20k overall reads made you a more popular author? (I could be wrong.) 20k reads overall across 5 stories (for example) isnāt that high. 20k in just one story over 2 weeks is high but itās also fairly rare. There were two contest winners this round with over 20k. One of these stories was released the day after the contest was announcedā¦ but that means it had a long time to accumulate reads. There arenāt usually many contest entries that accumulate that many reads over two weeks.
But sometimes unknown authors come out of nowhere and get over 10k reads (e.g Blurred Lines). Would this entry be judged as a popular author or unknown? I just canāt see an easy way to āseparateā well-known authors from lesser-known authors. What criteria would you use? Total reads? Instagram followers? Average reads per story?
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It would probably be either total reads and average reads per story but I get your point. While I want support underrated authors, I can see how it might be hard to find a criteria to seperate between popular and underrated authors. I like the idea of two sheleves but I can see how itās flawed
I guess a number of followers does speak about the authorās popularity. Judging by the average amount of reads per story seems also like a good idea!
I noticed immediately all but 2 of the winners had over 100kā¦ thatās completely disrespectful and unfair.
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Thank you very much for supporting the cause, Cat!
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Of course!!! 
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Iāve never seen a story with less than 1k reads win. If the read count was less that 10k, than it was like that for the majority of the winning stories. I feel that unrecognized authors have it hard, as their story could have a monthās work in it, but only 1 or 2 reads.
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I completely agree, thatās why I created this thread. Please, share it and spread the word so that we can get as many people on board as possible!
Friend of mine had 700 for Star Power when she won =).
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This honestly should have been done a long time ago.
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I see your point. But even after reading this thread, I donāt understand where you draw the line between popular and underrated authors. I want to support aspiring authors (and I still consider myself as one) but such a strong division may give rise to more conflicts. Maybe the most reasonable solution is extending the number of featured contest stories.
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I think a good solution is to stop making it a popularity contest. Content is what should matter, not how many people read it. Get rid of using reads as part of the criteria, it makes no sense.
If you insist on making it a popularity contest then the only fair thing would be to divide it into groups of like
āUnder total 5,000 total readsā
āAbove 5,000 but under 100,000 total readsā
āAbove 100,000 but under 500,000 total readsā
and maybe ā500,000+ total readsā
As it stands now the system is detrimental and it is a deterrent. Why would anyone want to join when they will always be crushed by someone with more reads? Throwing out an anomaly like āmy friend had 700 readsā doesnāt change the fact that the average user will find it very hard to succeed in these contests.
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