Okay, so that Bookhabit thing? Well, the competition closed with us ranked somewhere around #6; high enough to get into Round #3.

Seems like our celebration was premature. I'm just going to dump the email here because it's kinda involved, so…

Hi to all the writers in Round 2

Congratulations to those who made it through to Round 3, and commiserations to everyone else.

Applause for getting your work in the public eye, which is never painless, requires much bravery, and a shell as thick and strong as a geriatric tortoise.

I realise that not everyone will be feeling great right now, so thought I’d head off the flood of emails into my inbox by explaining some of the mystery behind the ranking, and the Top 10 not being as they appeared on the screen at the close of round 2. Unbelievably, we had a power cut affecting a good part of the city 3 minutes before the changeover, thus the delay in this email and the posting on the competition page. I hope that by the end of this email you will have more knowledge of the significant thought and resources that were put into this competition, and especially Round 2, to make it as fair as possible, and let you know that a lot of the criticisms levelled at the format were dealt with behind the scenes and in our scoring mechanisms and monitoring.

We watched the rankings very closely with both human eyes and computer analysis, and had a very good idea of how it was unfolding, the way people were ranking, and how the formulas were dealing with the rankings.

Top 10  - changes from the end of the competition
Unfortunately there was cheating. This was really disappointing. We warned that we were watching very closely. The Top 10 at Midnight GMT on the competition page are not the 10 books going through to Round 3.  The books going through are listed below and will be on the competition page shortly. The rankings over the last 24 hours have been manic and the % of genuine rankings has declined the closer it got to the end. The decision was made to pull out the false rankings at the end. Our logic behind this was that if others were ranking in a genuine way then this wouldn’t affect the end result. Also, if people were ranking negatively by marking the higher books down in their own lists, then the people who were cheating would have their books ranked down by the rankings of others. (This was in addition to having the false rankings removed - poetic justice?) We also left the removal of rankings until the end, as we didn’t want the people who were cheating to know that they had been caught, as this may have made our detection job more difficult.

Why didn’t we disqualify the books associated with cheating? Sometimes friends were doing it and obviously this can’t always be controlled by the writer. We also considered the possibility that someone could falsify cheating on a book other than their own to get it removed from the contest.

IMPORTANT: It does not mean that the writer cheated if their book dropped down the list when we made the adjustments. When we removed the false rankings, we removed all of that user’s rankings. As the false rankings were often repeated e.g. the same book was ranked in 2nd  place on all of the usernames that had been created by the one person, some books rankings were inflated and others deflated. This meant that books that attained higher rankings because of false rankings dropped down the list when we removed the false rankings. It doesn’t mean that there was any cheating on behalf of those authors.

The See-sawing Table
At some times during the fortnight, the scores were so close that a few high rankings combined with some lower rankings on the books around them would see a book leapfrog many places. To give you an idea of how close they were, at one point we noted that the spread of “points” between the 1st and 60th book was over 1000 “points”, but that 50 books were within 150 “points” of each other. I apologise that this led to a “White Knuckle Ride” and bitten finger nails - that is the way it was unfolding behind the scenes.

Another “trick” employed was to rank negatively i.e. people pushing the higher ranked books to the bottom of their ranking list, which is not exactly in the spirit of things – but predictable, so our formula dealt with that too.

Fans, friends and the Popularity Contest?
Promotion is good. It helps all of us. There was definitely a popularity component, but not nearly to the degree that most people thought. That is the reality of the book world – ignore promotion at your own peril. Our competition condensed the process of pitching to an agent or publisher, the acceptance/rejection cycle and taking a book to market. An author has to market their book. A publisher does not look only at the book any more. I talk to publishers regularly and they also evaluate the author and their ability to promote their book, especially with the first book.

We built a lot into our formula to mean that it wasn’t just a popularity contest.  People who promoted their books to more people could have potentially done better than the other books. Funnily enough, this didn’t work out for many of the books that got large numbers of “Number 1” rankings. One of the aims of the competition, which was repeated in the email I sent to everyone before Round 2, was the exposure of your writing to more people. People who got their friends to vote for them often only “Ranked” one book. The way our ranking mechanism aggregated the rankings meant that this one “ranking” did not carry as much weighting as people who took an interest and read and ranked more books.  Proof of this - one author created around 200 users and still didn’t get through to the Top 30 (even before we removed their false rankings). From this you can start to see that it wasn’t as easily manipulated as you might have thought.

Having said this, ranking all 60 books didn’t necessarily work to the best advantage of the book at the top of someone’s ranking table –the affect of this style of ranking wasn’t linear.

To a large extent, friend’s rankings were also self-moderating - people cancelled each other out. If we assume that the authors are all going to put their book in first place, then effectively they are all going to cancel each other out. The same logic applies to friends ranking, up to a certain number of friends. Then the weighting of the rankings outlined above becomes important again. We did some modelling on the ranking where we removed the top ranked book from everybody’s ranking to see how differently the list would be ordered. It hardly changed, which proves that this was not a big factor in the determination of the Top 10. The rankings then became more about who everyone ranked further down the list, and the independent rankers.

There was a bit of noise about the books not needing to be read to be ranked – this was taken into consideration outside of a person’s number 1 ranking. It is likely that many people had already shared their work with their close friends and a number of the writers have their work posted on their own websites, therefore their friends and fans had already seen it. To download a book you were not required to be logged in so this was more difficult to track e.g. I could have printed it out before I left work, read it on the train home, and then ranked it in the comfort of my lounge.

Explanation monologue over!
Hopefully this has assuaged some concerns. Please remember that this is an opinion based competition in ALL of the Rounds, otherwise it would be called a lottery. This doesn’t mean that when your book didn’t come in the Top 10 that it was better or worse than anyone else’s, it could be as simple as the people who ranked the books not liking your chosen genre. I know that there will still be some who are unhappy, and there is probably not much we can do about that. I am picking that everyone would have had a different Top 10, and that the final Top 10 is different again. It is certainly different from my Top 10, but that is the nature of opinions - you will never please everyone. Writing competitions judged solely by a panel suffer criticisms too.

We really hope that you have had fun over the competition so far and got some value out of the feedback, learnings, and promotion that your book received. One of the things that we aimed to do – give exposure to the books and authors  – is definitely being achieved.

On with Round 3!

Quoted From: Clare Tanner, Bookhabit

So, yeah.

At the end of the day turns out Chainbreaker dropped to 24th after all was said and done. Disappointment? I guess so, though I suppose realistically I knew that our chances of winning Round 3 against a batch of non-genre books was fairly slim. C'est la vie.

I'd like to give a big thank-you to anyone and everyone who took the time to support randomredux and I in this; you guys mean the world to us, seriously, so thank you.

I guess the next thing to decide is whether or not to pull Chainbreaker from the site. I've sort of glossed over this before, but I don't like Bookhabit's business model; the idea of them pulling a non-negotiable 60% of our profits when I'm unconvinced that they've earned us any real new exposure has always sat a bit uncomfortably, and from the start we were fairly upfront that we were in things for the competition. So… yeah.

Experiments in advertising, and all that, but we'll always have urbannordica.com.

Thanks again to everyone who came along with us for the ride. And watch this space…

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.