Third Round Horserace - First 24 Hours

THIS IS VERY NICE, DALE. Thank you. Very enlightening...

Heh, this is awesome and interesting.

Oh no! Something else to obsess about! (and I say that with a BIG smile on my face, Dale.) I'm finding myself obsessing as much this round as the last one when I was IN the contest.

In regards to keeping track like this, I really wouldn't spend so much time on it, Dale. The fraud sweeps will come in, but won't get rid of the astroturf. The rules do state that the highest ranked ones will move forward, and what better way to up your ranking than by getting everyone you know to vote a 10 for you.

What it doesn't guarantee, however, is the win. That one will be picked by the editors, so it won't matter how many votes the person gets. Right now, they're working for $500. And, trust me, with all the time I invested in Rounds 1 and 2, my hourly rate at finishing with a $500 award would be about $.02/hour - if that.

Clearly, we aren't in this for the money ;}

Aww but Judi, it's so fun!

Yeah Dale, thanks alot....now another article to bookmark and look at a hundred times a day!!! I have no friends?????????????????
LOL

Judi, could we elect you to be the referee this round???
:-)

The Boulevard stats say it all. If this was a contest to get the most friends to vote for you then that guy is the winner. You wonder if anyone reads it, there is not critiscm at all. Good luck to all the writers.

Someone give that Dream War and Speechless an astroturf vote so it will look like they have friends.

Oh no, Stephen! I'm staying out of it! I took enough grief last round! Besides, an agent requested Beauty and The Best and the work-in-progress, so I've got to finish it! I'll be reading/commenting when I can.

Judi F: I may or may not do the astroturf thing again. It was intended partly to point out to authors that the strategies that worked in the first two rounds may not work as well this time. More people are watching fewer authors.

I'm not really in a position to suggest strategies to the remaining authors, because after all I got eliminated in the first round and they didn't. At the same time, I suspect that the remaining authors should be handling this round differently than they did the first two. Yes, in the first two rounds the trick was simply to get as many tens from your friends as possible. If you got enough astroturf it didn't matter that no one outside of your fan club liked the chapter.

In this round, proving that you can appeal to someone outside your fan club should be the most important thing. Whether or not it will be depends partly on what Simon & Schuster intend to do with the winner. If this is mainly a publicity stunt on their part they may just take the least embarrassing of the top 5, do a small print run and let the book die on the vine. If they seriously intend to push the book, they will want a winner that has proven that it appeals to people outside of the writer's fan club.

If S&S is serious about promoting the winner, the semi-final round is a perfect dry run marketing effort. It costs S&S nothing, but it can show whether or not the author can go beyond their Mummy and Daddy and actually get strangers to like their chapters. The smart authors will be marketing heavily to Gather members. The dumb ones will be continuing what worked in the last two rounds.

Remember, S&S doesn't have to take any of the 5 finalists. They can go back and take any of the top 10. An entry that doesn't make the top 5 may well have a shot if they can prove the ability to market to the Gather community rather than just their fan club. Unless S&S views this as just a publicity stunt, that's what they almost certainly will be looking for.

Interesting comment about marketting Dale. You make some good points.

At this point, with only 10 entries, the review of the comments should go beyond just computer based fraud sweeps, which catch far less astroturf than the average eyeball scan. With only 10 entries, the admins should be visibly eyeballing all comments, to check for quality over quantity. That would eliminate the several hundred enthusiastic students who voted today with one-liners, and no real content. Oh well. At least they won't be walking off with the gift cards.

I did another partial sweep around 8:30 tonight but even I'm not obsessive enough to go through over 120 comments for Name Drop Zone. I did look at the two extremes from last time. The author of Dream Wars finally found 2 friends, or somebody loaned them to him (just kidding) and is now at 2 astroturf comments out of 23 comments, or 8.7% astroturf. At the other extreme, Junction Blvd is hanging in there with 39 out of 42 comments currently astroturf, for an impressive 92.86%.

Ah, Dale! Thank you for your obsessiveness! You've got me hooked. I've now bookmarked this page.

Regarding the massive amount of astroturf of one or more of the entries - captive or sitting audiences are not marketing, targeting new people with legitimate discretionary income who will purchase a book is marketing. To do that with success shows initiative, creativity and dedication to promotion. Grabbing warm bodies in front of you might actually hurt the perception that/those author(s) is/are trying to promote to his/her/their future editor.

Food for thought.

As I commented on that particular entry on the last round, friends and family and sock puppets can praise you to the skies, but ultimately, that doesn't change what's on the page.

Interesting analysis -- thanks for the hard work, Dale.

LOL
For the record, Senator, one of those votes is my brother and the other (get this)...I DON'T KNOW!

I added new results at the bottom of the original article. Highlights:

- a couple of entries had so many comments that even someone as obsessive as me didn't take time to go through them all.
- Dream War finally (barely) broke the 10% astroturf barrier. Junction Blvd is at a relatively anemic 89.06% astroturf, partly because one non-friend jumped on twice to nominate a line from the story as "Worst line ever". To be fair, Junction also got a favorable comment from an apparent non-friend today.
- Mike C. showed to comment on several entries today, often a couple of screens worth.

I'm actually starting to think that this contest is more fun to watch than to be in. It's like a soap opera only with (mostly) real people.

The sad part, to me, is we could have, at this point, a meaningful contest with 10 solid novels each with great commercial potential. Instead, what do we have? Two or three half-decent offerings and the rest worse than a waste of time. This has to be embarrassing to Gather, but they don't seem to care. I feel bad for the worthy entries elbowed out by the "end justifies the means" crowd.

I think Gather cares primarily about page clicks, which they did get from the contest.

Good writing, not so much.

I couldn't agree more, Ken C. and Lisa F. The writing in most of these is amateurish. I don't mean to ding the authors - everybody has to go through that stage while they're figuring out how to do this. It's just sad that the people who've already figured it out, and who have written books that are ready to be published, didn't make it to the top ten.

Cathy

Oooh, can we vent a little? I'm not going to name names...yet...but I took a little time yesterday and today to open up a bunch of the entries and skim them...and I really can't believe it. None of the chapters I looked at gave the sense that the books were going to hold up. There were obvious blunders in execution. I shake my head in appalled wonderment.

Looking back on my own book, it still needed work - I'm working on it now. And I'm not sure if I will ever get it to the place I feel like it needs to be. But...jeez...I'm not feeling so bad about its problems after seeing some of these bad boys.

"Yeah Dale, thanks alot"

Any so-called winner who writes this howler tells the real story of the contest. This is the worst writing around. I had my revised chapters reviewed by another knowlegeable contestant, who like many of us know real writing when they see it. When mine was up I could barely even get a handful of readers. The real writers have training. Any loser in this contest can be proud his or her writing is better than this by a long shot, provided it actually is.

Another obsessive contest watcher just published an article with a very interesting bunch of figures. They looked at where the entries stood last night and again at 5:30 this evening. The drive-bys were out in force, and it is interesting to see who got hit the hardest.

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976975397

This is absurd. I noticed this clown and his attacking of any sort of real reviews in Round 2. The fact that Gather not only continues to let him cheat his way to the top, but do so in such obvious fashion is a joke and a sham!

I commented on the winners thread ABOUT JUNCTION BOULEVARD'S CHEATING AND MANIPULATION...within minutes Gather President and COO is on "defending" him and their BS software. Didn't you all read? Don't you belive???

"In terms of any concerns expressed by some members around voting, please be assured that Gather utilizes the most sophisticated voting click fraud technology. Each of our winners should feel confident that they deserve to be on this list. "

Carl Rosendorf, Gather President & COO

"If you believe in Gather's sophisticated voting click fraud technology, clap your hands!"

"Each of our winners should be confident...?' Wha-?!?

It all makes sense now. Carl Rosendorf hasn't read any of the entries!

Cathy

You know, I really don't think I'd enter another Gather contest. They're too easy to game, so the results are suspect. And I imagine the winners are finding the process almost as bruising as the losers.

I really thought I'd be impressed (and humbled) by the quality of the winning chapters. I saw work that I knew was much better than my own in the first round, but none of it - NONE OF IT! - made the cut.

Huh.

Cathy

No way, no how would I enter another one of these contests.

Yikes. I just wrote a comment on a whole 'nother thread, having to do with active/passive voice, and used that phrase - no way, no how. Then I came over here and saw Lisa's comment.

Apparently, great minds really do think alike!

Cathy

Well, sort of in Gather's defense, they did do an anti-fraud sweep this morning, and one contestant went from around 7.2 down to 5.5, while losing nearly half of his votes. (he had already gone down from 8.3 to 7.2 overnight). Another contestant went up from 5.5 to 7.7, apparently due to drivebys being eliminated.

If they had done fraud sweeps this often in earlier rounds, ratings might have meant something and the good stuff might not have been lost in the junk. I hope they keep up the sweeps unpredictably every 2 to 4 days for the rest of the contest.

How does the anti-fraud technology work? What is its purpose?

Gather is very close-mouthed about how the anti-fraud technology works, mainly because they don't want contestants to be able to work around it. I've heard hints that it's being improved on an ongoing basis. I could speculate on what it consists of, but I won't because I'm all in favor of Gather being able to detect cheating.

What is the purpose of the anti-fraud technology? Well, to keep contestants from making up a bunch of bogus Gather names and using them to give themselves 10s and everybody else 1s, among other things.

With a considerable amount of money involved, Gather has to protect the other competitors against that sort of thing. They're actually to some extent protecting over-enthusiastic contestants against themselves. Winning money in this contest through fraud would almost certainly be a criminal act.

Now, I want to be very careful here. If I point out that someone has lost votes and ranking from a fraud sweep that does not mean that I'm saying they were cheating. I don't claim to know why for example Junction Blvdlost very close to half of its votes and dropped well over 2 points in the average ranking after this fraud sweep. Maybe the guy really did make up a bunch of bogus screen names to give himself 10s and other people 1s. Maybe there was some kind of entirely innocent explanation. I don't claim to know.

A lot of the commenters sound like the same person, IMO.

I think no matter what they do or who they chose, none of these first draft mistake-ridden novels is publishable. I suspect S&S will vetoe the whole bunch in the end.

If you are trying to follow this horse-race/soap opera, there is more information at

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976975397
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976978739
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976987709

thanks dale for your explanation of the anti-fraud technology.

I'd like to vetoe someone in the end!

Astrosurf is misleading. On average people lurk (verses responding) to message boards, forums, and sites like these 93% of the time. Most have little to add to what's already been said, or simply aren't interested enough to add anything.

Add to that, Gathers is a place for writers -- thus we write (hopefully, equal to how much we read.) I'm hoping most writers also have a life apart from a writing social networking place, too. Some of us are gardeners, too, therefore were planning, buying, and creating our gardens since the beginning of this contest and even after this. (Only halfway done sowing and planting my garden.) Besides that, I'm sure others had a variety of other things to contend with -- jobs, chores, family and friends.

To assume if no other comments have ever been made, except to a particular chapter, is as "reliable" a method as predicting the winner of the 2008 Super Bowl by deciding whose uniform is prettiest. Granted, I won a football pool once by picking teams that way, but I do not recommend that, or your way, for objectively deciding.

Now that the winners have just been announced, do you really think the publishers chose them by how many friends they had? (According to you 35% and 40% for both of them.)

I'll give you that I was shocked that some scripts I read didn't even make it to the second round, however, there has been no doubt that the ones who kept climbing up in the competition were publishing worthy, or well on their way to getting them published.

Writers write. We assume we are good enough to keep at it, but these folks have been proven good enough to keep at it! This leads me to believe that "astrosurf" probably taste like sour grapes. ;)

Lynn P: I did use one additional criteria to eliminate lurkers from the astroturf index. If someone joined Gather prior to the entry's going into the contest I did not consider them astroturf. That would eliminate any long-term lurkers.

As to sour grapes: I was happy with 4 out of the top 5, and while I wasn't too impressed with the writing in the winner I was impressed with the runner-up, and I thought that the winner was/is a very nice guy who worked very hard during the competition. I hope his book does well. Does that sound like sour grapes?