When is the best time to publish for a contest?

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I have 5 chapters of my Dirty Dancing entry ready to go, I was just wondering when would be the best time to upload it. The deadline is the end of July, what do I do?

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Liz wrote this on the H&V contest page :). It’s recommended that you wait, but there have been plenty of previous winners who published a long time before the deadline and still won. Retention isn’t counted until after the deadline though.

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I’ve noticed this too. I think the stories published earlier can also have an advantage if there are hundreds of contest entries. First of all, if someone searches for the entries before the deadline, they will find only a few stories there and it’s possible they will check out all of them.
After the deadline no one will read all of the entries, they will choose only a few ones that grab their attention. And besides the cover and description what grabs people’s attention? The number of reads.

Here is my theory: if story A was published 3 weeks ago and has 2K reads and story B was published a few hours ago and has 10 reads, many readers will think: “Hm, I’m gonna read story A, it has more reads, which means it is better”. And they will never give a chance to story B…

I believe this is one of the reasons why certain crappy stories will never leave the trending section and new authors have a hard time with getting reads. Sometimes I wish the number of views would not show up on the app at all, but I see why it is like this.

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I don’t know what to do, I’m quite proud of my story, it follows the plot of the film but has other characters and backstories too. However I’m just worried that no one will read it, I think I might do it at the end of this week, do you think that’s ok?

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Well, it’s hard to tell… As @EliseC mentioned, the reader retention will only count after the deadline, but at the same time I think you will have a better chance to get reads if you publish sooner. I’m not entering the contest, and I don’t know what I would do if I did, but I really don’t want to give you bad advice :confused:

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I think publishing it sooner would be great so that it allows more support from readers and gain popularity… Just my point of view though x

Love Sky x

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Ok, I think I’ll play it on the app, see if there’s anything I can improve on and then publish :blush:

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I took the plunge and published my contest entry, its called DD: This is Us, so please read it if you’d like :slight_smile:

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