Hello there, I’m the…ah… “miserable, filthy bastard” who wrote the story. When Abby told me he reposted my post here, I popped on to see if there was something I needed to add to it. Turns out there’s a much bigger problem I need to address. :wat: Oh, dear. Oh, dear.
I see you happened to have left your sense of sarcasm (as well as your “self-deprecating humor detector”) behind when you got up this morning, but don’t worry; I can help you sort it out now, dearie.
I see your initial concern is the legitimacy of asking for votes. This is understandable, but, in this circumstance, completely unwarranted. The site which hosts the competition, Inkitt, is a very…
aggressive encourager of getting its authors to go out and hunt down votes. We writers receive both notifications and emails telling us to go forth and ask people (via Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to vote for our stories. Therefore,
it is in no way cheating to ask our friends to vote for us. Not to mention that votes themselves do not determine a winner to the completion. The winner is chosen by Inkitt staff from those who reach the top 10% of contestants; which means that, even if I somehow had the highest number of votes on the site, I’d still have the exact same chance as all the other contestants who had reached that 10% line.
As for your comment that I was only asking for votes and that I haven’t “even a care in the world if you plan to read the whole thing or not”…excuse me while I have a chuckle. Here is the original part of my post where I asked for votes:
Disregarding the fact that I
am making fun of myself (which I already am aware that you
missed), I would like to know
exactly where you see me saying I don’t care if anyone reads the story. Go ahead. Point it out. I’ll wait while you hunt it down. Here’s what seems to be catching you up: I have been working on this story since 2012, it is on its second posted version and I can’t even begin to tell you how many drafts of it I’ve done. It’s my baby. As I have been with the DMC forums for
over five years, most of the active members that are also writers have either read it themselves or are used to me talking about it and know a lot about the story. As I was, in fact, directing the post to them, I saw no need to remind them to read it…especially given that I know they’re all clever enough to see that the story is what I was linking to even though the voting is on the same page.
Now, what concerns me the most is this: “Surely their original submission is good enough to stand a fighting chance by its own merits?” I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say that, judging by the fact that I don’t see any threads in this section dedicated to
your writing, you haven’t had much experience with publishing of any kind. If that is indeed the case, it’s understandable that you might think as you do. The fact is, writing is a very cut-throat business. If you want to get anywhere, you have to promote yourself. If you just write something and wait and hope it gets going on its own, well…you’re going to be sorely disappointed. It doesn’t matter if you’re the best writer in the entire world, you still have to try and sell yourself.
I hope I have answered all of your queries and that this post has been helpful to you. It honestly saddened me to see just how confused you were (to have to resort to insulting people you’ve never met just to get your point across…it must have been very painful for you, especially given that one of the people you insulted is trying to get their original novel published and never posted anything asking for votes—that was
my doing to help her out), and I hope it all makes more sense to you now. Have a wonderful day.