Graham Storrs

A new kind of contest

Continuing yesterday’s competitions theme, I see the Editor Unleased/Smashwords Flash Fiction 40 competition has announced the 40 lucky winners.  (That’s me, about half-way down the list, under the user ID graywave.) As there are 40 winners and there were only 280 entrants, that puts me roughly in the top 20%.

I remember a day, many, many years ago, when a friend of mine said – a propos of nothing in particular – “You’re a leader of men. You’re one in twenty.”  His sincere tone and generally admiring manner suggested he really meant it as a compliment. I’ve often wondered what prompted it and I’ve often wished I’d quizzed him about it instead of just staring at him, gobsmacked. Yet I have often noticed that, in various areas of life, I am, actually, one in twenty – somewhere in that top 5% anyway. Of course, it depends on how well you choose your comparison group. With care, you can be one in a hundred or better.

Flash Fiction 40 was a bit of fun – and a marketing ploy, of course. That’s why there were so many winners. It was also a very unusual contest in that there were two kinds of judging. First off, all the entries were on display at the Editor Unleashed Forum and readers were asked to read as many as possible and to give each one a score out of 5 (5 good, 1 bad). Then a bunch of ‘editors’ read through all of the stories and made an independent assessment of them, coming up with the top 40 and an overall winner. So it was partly like a normal contest and partly a beauty contest.

Frankly, it is the beauty contest side of this that was most interesting for me. It often occurs to me to worry that I don’t write in a popular-enough style. When you don’t have a book on the shelves and have no sales figures to look at, all you have to go on is what editors and agents think. Here was a chance to see just how well-received my work would be because the average ratings for all 280 stories are on display. At first glance, this tells you almost nothing, since the numbers are rounded to the nearest whole number and presented as stars. As anyone who has ever done social science research would expect, 3 stars was the score almost everybody got. Slightly more interesting was the fact that there were no four-star and no five-star ratings (plenty of 2s and a few 1s). But, if you look beneath the stars at the actual scores, it is even more interesting. Almost nobody scored as high as 3. There were literally half a dozen or so scores of 3.00 and above. The overall winner had a score of 3.50.

Most inetersting to me was that my own score was 3.22* putting me in the top handful of stories by reader’s score, certainly well within that magical 5% group. So, what can I conclude from all this:

1. Readers, at least those who visited this site, who were probably also writers, like my stuff.
2. People vary widely in their tastes. I can tell this because this was a very varied bunch of stories and there were no stand-out winners. The ratings clustered around the mean.
3. People didn’t really like any of these stories much. The top few percent managed to scrape an average just above 3. The great majority were in the 2-3 range. I suspect that if Anton Checkhov and O. Henry had entered pieces of flash fiction, they wouldn’t have made it to 4. (It would have been easy to ‘game’ the contest by giving a low rating to anything that looked better than your own piece. This kind of behaviour would certainly explain the strange shift to low scores. Are writers really so devious?)
4. There are some good flash fiction writers out there. I read dozens of these stories and found some real gems.
5. People can be very nice. Several people – all of them strangers – took the trouble to write to me to say how much they had enjoyed my story. Some were extremely flattering. It’s just what a writer needs, sometimes.
6. 204 people read one of my stories who would not otherwise have done so (well, 202, really). That alone has to have been worth the trouble of putting it in an email and sending it in.

Fascinating. This particular ‘win’ won’t go in my cv, but it has definitely been an interesting event to participate in.

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*Look, I could work out the variances and give those, too, I know averages without variances don’t mean too much, but life is just too short. Besides, there were all kinds of biases. For instance, writers were encouraged to recuit all their friends and family to go along and rate their stories – including all their Facebook ‘friends’. This is fair enough, since it is, after all, a popularity contest and, as I said, a marketing ploy. But this did make some of the figures a bit suspect. Most pieces had between 150 and 200 readers, I’d say (mine had 204 – but I swear I only mentioned I’d entered to two people) but a few had over 500 readers – including the winner.