mati:
rollin: It's a bit disheartening to hear that there is a wide range of reads for each of the stories in the contest
Or encouraging for the authors whose stories get the most reads?
I acted exactly as njrick wrote above: I clicked on every story in the contest, but sometimes I didn't read the stories, because it was absolutely out of my interests. In this cases I also didn't vote on them. And some story I opened more than twenty times. Assuming that only about 50 readers at all read stories in the competition I would say, that 50 reads per story indicates that all stories got equal attention. The story with the 296 clicks is probably the one, which I opened 50 times because I was always disturbed while reading it.
Ahhhh well, I cast votes (between four and ten) for every story, some of them I may have 'clicked onto' 2-3 times because I was interupted during my reading or simply wanted more exposure to evaluate them, and I did read every one to its conclusion. A few of them weren't particularly gratifying for me to read based on setting, characterization, plot line, etc., but I felt that all the writers had put in significant time and effort and therefore should get some votes from me.
I gave quite a few contest entries votes in the 8-10 range because they were well written and particularly had clever and/or surprising storylines--I generally enjoy twist endings, as long as the unexpected development doesn't contradict earlier characterizations and/or plot elements. If a lengthy narrative is too formulaic (I can figure out a 5,000-word story's basic plot line only 1,000 words or so into it), I find it difficult to become all that interested in reading it.
Anyway, I like the current method of voting--when I only had ten total votes to distribute, I felt that I wasn't able to cast votes for every deserving entry and still make a distinction among the top half-dozen (IMHO) stories... --C.K.