Picture Story Challenge: June 2012

Let me be the first to offer my congratulations to the winners - and my thanks to everyone who participated. I believe this challenge generated some very fine stories. I'd also like to thank everyone who took the time to read the challenge stories, vote and comment on them.

Looking forward to the next one.

I heartily agree - congratulations to the winners, and many thanks to everyone who participated in the spirit of the challenge. We now have lots more items for the library, and plenty more comments.

It was wonderful to read so many interpretations of the challenge picture, and some of the stories were very original, imaginative and emotionally charged.

Well done everyone

Just wanted to add my congratulations to all who took part and a special well done to the top six

I do enjoy our challenges

Just to add my congratulations to all the winners and indeed the runners-up as well of course those that entered the competition.

I've just glanced through who wrote which story and was staggered by the difference in the number of views that a story actually received from the lowest of 139 to the highest of 326 views.

In my mind this possibly indicates that many people cherry pick a story depending on the title i.e. does it catch them in a way that makes them want to read it?

How interesting, I started reading the stories, starting with the shortest, getting into the 3000 word ones. Needless to say I didn't vote as I didn't manage to get through them all, and that wouldn't have been fair.

I found I'd not read any of the winners or runners up - does this show that a long story is preferred to a short one?

As an (again) unsuccessful author, (J Wackford Colton) I would like to add my congratulations to the winners. All thoroughly deserved and great reads.

opb
Interesting - I just don't know. But one assumes there is an optimum length to a story. Factors like time available to read and one's own attention span must come into play.

Depends how you measure success.. I'd say getting 20 comments was quite successful ...

An excellent set of stories given that the content of the picture rather constrained the parameters. But if there's any more stories about wills and spanking appear, having read around fifty in the last month, I'm afraid I for one simply won't read them!

I thought this time the titles were all very similar: "Uncle x's bequest", "Aunt Y's will", "Grandfather's inheritence" - not really eye-catching. And a title like "Better than Botox" which actually caught my attention has also quite few views. I think one reason is, that I opened longer stories more often before I finished reading them. That may explain why many of the shorter stories have less views than the longer ones.