Let's Talk About... The Way To Win A Contest

I can see where you’re coming from, I’m not too sure that Langdon is going to win this time. But some other popular author can. There’s a 70% advantage chance and 30% disadvantage chance. It’s all about luck and what you write

It will be interesting to see the results because she’s previously said before she’s won every contest she’s entered

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The luck may not be with her this time, she wrote a pretty controversial story oof

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There are quite a lot of “popular” authors that have entered this time (depending on your definition of popular) and I doubt that they’ll all win. But I guess we’ll see :rofl:

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A lot of not-so-popular authors entered. You know, they don’t have much reads but they have a lot of friends and followers.

I’ve grown apathetic to these contests. I wish there were some contests only for small authors tbh.

There would be problems since everyone’s definition of small author is different. Honestly, I prefer Episode being completely transparent with us rather than holding a contest for small authors. Because I wouldn’t want an author with 40k reads to join a contest where I, an author with 1k reads is joining. She’s not very small compared to me.

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I think a small author is anyone who is new to the community with no ‘connections’ and who struggles to get reads and has to do read for reads and stuff like that to get reads.

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That’s a good definition.

It’s a good definition but hard to quantify.
If Episode was ever going to “segregate” the contests (which I personally don’t agree with for many reasons), they’d need to create clear criteria to do so.

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I wonder if she herself might be doing a test then haha

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I decided to bump this thread because I always had some theories about these contests and therefore I’ve been have monitoring the College Days entries. Since the winners are announced and there is also a new contest going on, I thought I would share my thoughts.
I think I did quite good with my predictions because out of the 12 winners I managed to guess 7, plus another 2 that I considered to be a potential winner.

Here are the theories I wrote down before the CC contest. You can see my verdict on them now that the shelf is up:

  • You can’t make it to the shelf with less than 500 reads - TRUE: the less read story had 1.7K when the shelf appeared
  • There will be 2 winner stories at most with less than 1K reads - TRUE AND FALSE: I said at most 2, there was not a single one
  • They always choose 1 author with their very first story - TRUE and this is VVIP by Ai Hart
  • Not known authors can get more reads if they publish before the deadline - TRUE: 1 story won from a brand new author, and 1 from an author who had only a very few reads before the contest - they both published weeks before the deadline and already had more than 500 reads when the counting started
  • Authors above 500K total reads will get over 1K reads regardless when they publish - TRUE? There were actually more popular authors entering than I expected, and if my records are correct 16 of them have more than 500K but 2 didn’t reach 1K reads on their contest entry
  • There will be more authors selected over a million reads overall - FALSE: only 1, and she is “only” at 1.1M
  • Mostly medium known authors will win, especially if they had been already featured on a shelf - TRUE, but I have to admit I was surprised to see how many really popular authors entered but didn’t win
  • There will be at least 1 winner who already won a contest - TRUE

I won’t share the conclusions I made of these because

  1. who cares :smiley:
  2. I might be wrong
  3. Even if I’m right, it would probably make people even more confused.

Anyways, I’m happy to see 12 winners and some of my favourite entries on this shelf. Congratulations to everyone!

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Thank you for this Annie! I’ll be sharing the actual way to win a contest very soon with a parody shelf.

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Really? :astonished:
I can’t wait :smiley:

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I’m analyzing all of the entries right now, so it might take a few days. But from pretty much what I’ve gathered:

You at least need 800 reads to be graded by Episode.

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FASCINATING! I personally would like to hear your conclusion whether or not you might be wrong or if it would make people more confused but that’s because I just love you I tend to share the same opinion as you with practically everything.

@amberose is spits_out_drink
REALLY?! :grin:

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Wow, that’s quite a list. I love theories! I think, however, that the College Days contest has not really been representative, when it comes to read counts etc. I am under the impression that the stories published for this contest have received exceptional reader engagement overall. The fact that there is no story with under 1k reads on the shelf could be due to a very high percentage of entries having reached over 1k overall. So, the pool of under 1k entries was smaller this time.

I mean, I have to admit, I have not monitored this as much as you obviously did :smile: Just my thoughts on the theories, which I genuinely enjoyed. Thank you for sharing them!

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I agree with you, I was surprised by the reader interest for this contest in overall. And although I’ve always thought big authors have the advantage because of the reads, it seems to be proven that high number of reads can also hurt reader retention, just probably not as much as low number of reads do.

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Come to think of it, I don’t have anything to prove this point, so I will just go with this one: high number of reads can also hurt reader retention.

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