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The now fully official Author’s Hangout Halloween 2025 competition support thread

My Halloween story will be published on the 12th, probably 6 hours I submitted it.

Very happy about that!

In the meantime, part 4 of my story is in the pending limbo! Will wait a few days before deleting it and resubmitting it.
 
SouthernCrossfire said:
The contest story listing not having the category shown helps on this in a way since some readers may give a different category a chance, but I think you're right that some readers will shell out and try something else when they see non-favored categories or those that don't seem as associated with an event. While Romance stories often do well in all types of contests, sometimes including Halloween, Halloween readers generally wouldn't think Romance first or maybe even tenth with regard to category when they're looking for spooky or scary Halloween stories.

As a check, I've done one Halloween Romance story. It was a fun tale but wasn't really in contention. I've also done a Halloween Mature story that I just compared it to. The Romance was more fun and definitely had a more creative storyline, but other than score (less than 0.2 difference at contest end), the Mature story's stats are roughly twice those of the Romance story. The Mature story just missed placing.

A sample size of two is way too small to be meaningful, but I recall having these same thoughts as those two contests were running and, you guessed it, this year's story is in Mature.
Click to expand...
Seems to me that Erotic Horror is the worst option.
 
My story, submitted about 2-1/2 hours ago, has already been approved for publication on Sunday. Thank you, Laurel!

EmilyMiller said:
Seems to me that Erotic Horror is the worst option.
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I haven't checked recently but that seemed like a small category to me when I looked at it a while back. I've used elements of EH in a different and larger but still appropriate category.
 
EmilyMiller said:
More generally, my personal perspective had been that the comp effect has somewhat deteriorated over time. But I think this is a part of the general issue that writers face here. Readers have gone up by X%, numbers of stories published have gone up by Y%, Y > X, and so views per story have gone down.
Click to expand...

My last two stories have had almost no eyes on them. I have assumed that's the categories I felt I had to select (EH for the Halloween entry, then EC for the Crime and Punishment... EC being one of my least favorite posting categories for precisely this reason). My last Mature submission, from August, is struggling to top 10k views. I hadn't been paying attention.

I wonder now whether this is a broader trend, since July. My June story has significant engagement (27k views) in Toys and Masturbation, which I don't think of as an extremely active category.
 
Voboy said:
My last two stories have had almost no eyes on them. I have assumed that's the categories I felt I had to select (EH for the Halloween entry, then EC for the Crime and Punishment... EC being one of my least favorite posting categories for precisely this reason). My last Mature submission, from August, is struggling to top 10k views. I hadn't been paying attention.

I wonder now whether this is a broader trend, since July. My June story has significant engagement (27k views) in Toys and Masturbation, which I don't think of as an extremely active category.
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It’s maybe Global Weirding, what used to feel like hard and fast rules about this place seem to no longer apply 🤷‍♀️.
 
Voboy said:
My last two stories have had almost no eyes on them...
Click to expand...

Your Halloween story is quite long, which tends to require more investment from the side of the reader. This may turn off those with a short attention span.

To give an example, I posted 2 stories for this Halloween event:

- A short one (< 2 pages) that currently stands at 18106 views and 1632 votes
- A long one (> 7 pages) that currently stands at 3865 views and 111 votes

In other words, the short one has 4.6 times as many views and almost 15 times(!) the number of votes (which I assume translates to the number of people who actually read it).

So you shouldn't take it as a critique. It maybe simply be because some readers are intimidated by the grandiose scale of your imagination... ;)
 
I think there is a strong correlation between the number of words in a story and the number of viewers.

I have experienced that in my (low sample) stories.
 
StrangeLife said:
Your Halloween story is quite long, which tends to require more investment from the side of the reader. This may turn off those with a short attention span.

To give an example, I posted 2 stories for this Halloween event:

- A short one (< 2 pages) that currently stands at 18106 views and 1632 votes
- A long one (> 7 pages) that currently stands at 3865 views and 111 votes

In other words, the short one has 4.6 times as many views and almost 15 times(!) the number of votes (which I assume translates to the number of people who actually read it).

So you shouldn't take it as a critique. It maybe simply be because some readers are intimidated by the grandiose scale of your imagination... ;)
Click to expand...
Your stories are in Non-Human and Loving Wives, which explains the view discrepancy in entirety. Long stories can get high views, especially when written by competition-wining authors (and more importantly excellent authors) like @Voboy.
 
StrangeLife said:
Your Halloween story is quite long, which tends to require more investment from the side of the reader. This may turn off those with a short attention span.
Click to expand...

Well, no, not particularly: it's 27k words, which is probably about my average. It's significantly shorter than the story I wrote for last year's contest, which nearly won and had about 10k views at this point (a year later, it's over 70k). Tellingly, that story was in a different category: I seldom post to EH, and I doubt its readers were expecting the subject matter I put into this story. My last story in EH was more conventionally horrifying, and did far better (it, too, was significantly longer than this one).

All this is merely an observation; I'm not complaining. There's every possibility I simply missed the mark with this story, but even accounting for the idea that it's not as good as I was hoping it was... it's still got a teensy-tiny number of views. Whatever it is that accounts for "view" data, my story ain't doing it. I still maintain the category is the main variable, but that doesn't explain everything.

I'll be very curious how my next one does. I'm aware that my best stories are probably behind me, which is fine with me... but by any standard, my views are markedly lower than they've recently been.

EmilyMiller said:
It’s maybe Global Weirding, what used to feel like hard and fast rules about this place seem to no longer apply 🤷‍♀️.
Click to expand...

This is something I've noticed in a few different ways. It's making me wonder about several things.
 
So I originally had absolutely nothing in mind for a Halloween story but I'm kinda sorta maybe getting my writing mojo back and have a half finished story that would fit the theme if I can get my shit together and finish it. 🤞
 
EmilyMiller said:
Your stories are in Non-Human and Loving Wives, which explains the view discrepancy in entirety. Long stories can get high views, especially when written by competition-wining authors (and more importantly excellent authors) like @Voboy.
Click to expand...

Good point - though I still believe that size matters too (even if my girlfriend keep saying the opposite).

Maybe I'll try posting a 7-page plus story in Loving Wives and a 2-pager in Non-Human next year, just so we can get it confirmed... :unsure:
 
StrangeLife said:
Good point - though I still believe that size matters too (even if my girlfriend keep saying the opposite).

Maybe I'll try posting a 7-page plus story in Loving Wives and a 2-pager in Non-Human next year, just so we can get it confirmed... :unsure:
Click to expand...
When you have been more successful here than @Voboy has is probably the best time to think about explaining how things work to him.
 
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