Who will be the Authortrek Writer of the Month?
How to Vote for a story
You don’t have to be logged into the site to vote – any visitor to the site can vote. If the author hasn’t given you the link to their story, then you can look for it via the search engine or via the list of ‘Recent Stories’ on the right hand side. At the bottom of every story, there is a vote button:
To vote, just click on the “Vote” text. Once you have voted, the box will record your vote:
If you want to vote for a story that’s already included in the list of ‘Most Popular Stories’, then it’s still best to look for the story title via the search engine, as the linked pages in the list of the ‘Most Popular Stories’ don’t have vote buttons.
Please note that each author and visitor to the site is only allowed to vote for a particular story once. In order to ensure a fair voting system, we have now introduced a sophisticated analytics system that now allows us to detect irregular voting patterns. If we detect irregular voting, then the author of the relevant story will be penalised by having 10 votes deducted in the first instance, their whole vote tally deducted in the second instance, and the author will be expelled from the site if irregular voting is detected on a third occasion. We do want to keep the voting system open to the general public, rather than restricted to members of the site, as the whole point of Authortrek Short Stories is to gauge public support of each individual author, so we appreciate your support in keeping the content of the site open to all.
Although your vote may help your favourite author win the title of ‘Authortrek Writer of the Month’, this is not just a competition to discover which author is the most popular. Remember, you are voting on the story also. Our analytics system also tells us how long each visitor spends on every page. In the eventuality that a poor story has won the most votes in a particular month, we may well favour a better written story with fewer votes, especially if our analytics system reveals that people have just voted without actually reading a particular story, as we want to reward writers that have an audience that truly engages with their work.
