Initially, I thought that "Story of the Week" was earned by earning the most "Likes", views, favorites or something in a given week, but after parsing through what few forum posts there are on the subject, some say that it's simply just chosen by some mysterious person or voted on by a group of people. Does anyone actually know how the process works? Since I'm a bit of a glory hound, I've been interested in trying for this honor and would like to know more. Is there a list somewhere of past "Story of the Week" winners?
You should start keeping one and seeing if you can spot a pattern. (I do, and I have, but that's for me to know and you to find out if your canny and persistent enough: suffice it to say: It's NOT easy to win.)
From what I noticed, it's based on views, but the same author can't have story of the week twice for a long time, so it's passed to the next one on the list if the most viewed story was written by an author who recently got story of the week. I think it's like this, don't know for sure, though.
Damn, whatever this creature is has some pretty vanilla fetishes for an extraplanar being. I thought it'd be more into tentacles, world-eating (vore?) and stuff.
I remember reading somewhere that it's just most views on a given week, can only be story of the week once in a long while but didn't see anything about authors being blocked from having it multiple times if this is on multiple stories. I got it twice on two different stories and also had the not so nice chance of having a new story getting 2/3 of its views on the first week with tons of chapter added to it, be behind an old story with huge traffic and so losing all chances of being story of the week. I think a nice addition to the site would be that you could see that a story had it at some point and to make it a search criteria. So people can look for them.
Hey fellas! I got an update for everyone. I messaged Friedman to see if he could divulge just a bit of more on the selection process for "Story of the Week" and he told me the following: "Right now, the story of the week is determined by chapter depth and activity during the last week. Randomness is also at play. But stories have to have at least 25 chapters and show a certain level of activity."
I've had my stories featured in the sotw, it was when I was updating them a lot. So frequent updates and new threads will help if you want to be featured.
So, to sum up. These are some of the requirements that are evident so far: The story must have 25 chapter depth and an unknown number of total chapters. It seems that if you can just spam until you hit a thread of at least 25, you qualify. Chapter length, quality or feedback (such as comments/likes) has no impact. Total Likes don't seem have that much of an effect. There may be a certain threshold, but it is probably no more than 100 since that is the lowest I've seen. Currently not sure about age but I would guess that it has to be at least a week old, but I haven't noticed anything about that. Recent activity seems to play a large part, so updating and uploading chapters to the story. When your story becomes "Story of the Week" it cannot be so again for a certain amount of time, not sure how long. Hope this helps.
