The Official Authors' Hangout Winter Holidays 2017 Support Thread

Just made a very, very last minute submission.

Phew.

Didn't have time to edit it much but I knew that if I waited 'til next year, I'd never publish it.

So there it is.

Same for me. Just submitted my Group story. The editor that promised to look over it went incommunicado after I sent her the draft (maybe it's shit?). So I had to do a last minute edit myself. Risky, because I know I'm bad at spotting my own mistakes. But at least they are all my mistakes this time. Started this one for the 2015 contest, so didn't want to wait another year.
 
Just submitted, and I actually feel more responsible this time than I did last, because last time I only got it in the last hour before the cut-off. I'm improving!

Not a lot, but still.
 
Valentine's Day is coming...!

I won't start the Valentine's Day support thread yet but remember that the first day for entries is in about the third week of January and Christmas is in the way.

We are in the last hours for entries to the Winter Holidays contest.

Read, vote and comment on the entries that are posted, please.
 
Good luck to everyone that got a story in. Been enjoying reading my way thru them all with no competitive streak kicking in :D
 
You off colour, girl?

Lol. No, I had a deadline for another story (the "Blood Sacrifice" one and then I went back to working on "Mistaken Identity." I had a good concept for the competition but not enough time to write it so I passed. The next one tho ....
 
Lol. No, I had a deadline for another story (the "Blood Sacrifice" one and then I went back to working on "Mistaken Identity." I had a good concept for the competition but not enough time to write it so I passed. The next one tho ....

I started targeting that winged menace right in his diapered butt last night. But, ideas kept coming to me, so I switched to a scatter gun. (3 stories started and saved at roughly 12kb.) How you doin'? :devil:
 
Read, vote and comment on the entries that are posted, please.

I've brewed over this idea for a while now, and your quoted comment (after some delay) has prompted my response.

I don't think that contestants should even be able to vote or comment on other author's stories in the contest. I'm surprised that you would encourage it. There's should be a 'fair competition' ethic that prevents contestants from voting on their competitor's entries.
 
There's no way of knowing whether the votes even count. It's often been speculated that contestant votes are wiped out from all stories in the very first pass.

As to commenting, that's what used to be one of the best things about the contests. Large numbers of AHrs would read, vote, and comment ( RVC ) on every story in the contest they possibly could. The comments were rarely negative, and sometimes even included constructive criticism healthily sprinkled with praise for what worked well.

If you really didn't like something, you simply didn't vote or comment on it.

That commentary and support continued in these threads, with stories often getting highlighted by other contestants who found someone else's story particularly good.

This was back when people didn't take the whole thing so fucking seriously. It was a group activity for the AH, purely for fun, and thrills from the roller-coaster of sweeps.

Dig back into the archives of Oggs contest threads sometime. Look at how the threads used to be back before around 2008.

RVC was a huge part of what made those threads the positive places they were.

I've brewed over this idea for a while now, and your quoted comment (after some delay) has prompted my response.

I don't think that contestants should even be able to vote or comment on other author's stories in the contest. I'm surprised that you would encourage it. There's should be a 'fair competition' ethic that prevents contestants from voting on their competitor's entries.
 
That sort of "contest" shouldn't also come with monetary awards. That's really counterproductive. Not that it's really a contest anyway.
 
98 entries. Is that fewer than previous years? It certainly seems quieter.

I've only had four comments on my story. I did expect a few more. C'est la vie.
 
Historically, it's a light year. If I remember correctly, this contest typically averaged closer to 150 due to the longer submission period, while Valentine's and Halloween typically were around this 100 level. Every other contest was a distant fourth to those.

98 entries. Is that fewer than previous years? It certainly seems quieter.

I've only had four comments on my story. I did expect a few more. C'est la vie.
 
How can you even tell when it's hit by several 1 star votes in quick succession? Just by calculating what it would take to shift your score so suddenly?
 
The late zings are more or less all "sound and fury". They have little to no chance of surviving the bone-cutting final sweeps, and the story is well outside the honeymoon period where the ( temporary ) reduction in score can hurt your readership potential.

Just giggle at the impotence of petty little trolls desperately trying to be relevant :D

Quieter? I had a 4.79 score then was hit with three 1 votes in the last 10 minutes. Not quiet for me.
 
You have to be far enough from the debut for your activity to have slowed to a trickle, and checking fairly regularly to see the dips. There's no place to view any individual vote.

Alternately, if you're in a low-vote category like Erotic Couplings, Sci-Fi&Fantasy, etc., you can sometimes see them through the plunging score throughout the lifespan of the story.

How can you even tell when it's hit by several 1 star votes in quick succession? Just by calculating what it would take to shift your score so suddenly?
 
Had to look. LOL

Yeah, that's odd, to say the least. It's written like praise and suggestion for future episode, but so full of off-putting vulgarity that it's suspect as some kind of trolling performance art.

I think I just received my first troll comment.

It was...strange.
 
I'm only now getting over frequently refreshing Holly Jolley.

It's exceeded my expectations. Closing in on 1700 votes, over 200 favorites, 20 some-odd comments, over 70k views, several emails, and I've moved up from 203 to 164 on the favorite author list since it came out.

Had enough activity to put me at #1 on the Mature category popular authors list even though I haven't posted a story in that category in months. I haven't been keeping close track, but I would imagine I've had a significant boost in votes on my back catalogue. There's certainly been lots of favoriting and a few comments coming from stories across all categories.
 
Just me then. Oh well. I'll have to write something for a more popular category next time.
 
I'm only now getting over frequently refreshing Holly Jolley.

It's exceeded my expectations. Closing in on 1700 votes, over 200 favorites, 20 some-odd comments, over 70k views, several emails, and I've moved up from 203 to 164 on the favorite author list since it came out.

Had enough activity to put me at #1 on the Mature category popular authors list even though I haven't posted a story in that category in months. I haven't been keeping close track, but I would imagine I've had a significant boost in votes on my back catalogue. There's certainly been lots of favoriting and a few comments coming from stories across all categories.

...

I'm so jelly.

But nah, you've been way more active than I have and gotten there with a lot of work that I fail to put in. So respect!
 
Just me then. Oh well. I'll have to write something for a more popular category next time.

Should probably do so as well. My story was too tame for BDSM so I put it in First Time for the lack of a better alternative. Better start working on those Group Sex and Incest stories...
 
You can't compare results from an incest story to a story in any other category. The category gets insane amounts of traffic. There was a Mom-Son story out a couple of days before mine that was well on its way to 3000 votes and over 100k views.

I've always said you could copy pages out of the phone book and get 20k views in Incest. LOL ( Actually, I used to say 50k, but that was before the bot filter was tweaked )

The scores in the category fall well below the mid .80-.90 range where the winners emerge, too. Then the sweeps barely touch them because math. So, if you're hoping for a W, it's not the best category for it by any stretch of the imagination.

It helps that I have a lot of pseudo-crossover with MILF stories as well. Those seem to attract a lot of Mom-Son readers, which is the largest audience in Incest, and thus helps my readership in both categories and overall retention despite having no M/S in this name and only a smattering of incest.

Just me then. Oh well. I'll have to write something for a more popular category next time.
 
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