So, hoping that we would get definitions for "undiscovered" and "famous" during this survey, we also set out to find what our participants thought contests and other promotional opportunities should look like for those two separate groups. If you've participated in many awards at all, I'm sure you're familiar with read limits. For example, a rule stating that "you may only join this award if you have less than 5k views". Different awards use different amounts, of course, but I thought it was important to find out what participants for these kinds of things think about read limits. Do they help undiscovered authors? Are they fair? If so, how can we apply our definitions of "undiscovered" and "famous" to them?

To explore this idea, we asked four basic questions:

1. Should awards/contests only be for undiscovered authors/books?
2. Should awards/contests exclude famous books?
3. Should awards/contests exclude famous authors?
4. Should all awards, contests, and other promotional opportunities be open to everyone, regardless of how many reads/follows they have?

Now, some of the results we got appeared to be a little contradictory at first, but I think that's for three reasons. One, I think people were making up their mind and sorting through their thoughts as they were answering these questions. This might have been the first time they'd made a solid opinion on the matter, and so maybe their convictions weren't as straightforward as you might expect. Two, when writing the questions, I thought that "undiscovered" and "famous" were antonyms, but as we saw earlier, most people do not. There is some middle ground I didn't account for well in my questions. Three, some people when they say "famous" mean "Wattpad sponsored," like Stars, Paid authors, Wattys winners, etc. So keep these things in mind as we view the results.

Question 1: 

This one was a close call! The people on the fence about this question are evenly matched. However, 8% more people Strongly Disagree that awards should be just for undiscovered books than Strongly Agree. So, by a narrow margin here, it sounds like our sample thinks awards should be for more than just "undiscovered" books, as a lot of awards claim. It's obviously a split topic, though.

Question 2:

We have a little more agreement on this one. Ten percent more people thought awards should allow famous books than thought they should be excluded. It's still close though, and considering we only asked 107 people, this isn't a resounding conclusion.

Question 3:

Here, the consensus becomes a lot clearer. While famous books are up for debate, 73% of the people we talked to do not think that famous authors should be excluded from contests. To me, this makes sense. Just because one of their books is amazing doesn't mean they all are, and just because one of their books has lots of views doesn't mean they all will. Why punish them for their success? They just want to get their work out there like everyone else.

Question 4:

And here, the picture becomes the clearest! Only 15% of the participants thought that opportunities like contests and awards should be closed to people based on how many reads they have. Almost everyone agreed that awards and contests should be open to everyone.

How do we reconcile that with the previous indecision? I'm not sure, but considering people were leaning this way, and then they almost all concluded that awards should be open to everyone, it seems pretty compelling to me.

Maybe awards shouldn't have read limits anymore.

That doesn't mean they couldn't have different sections for different amounts of reads, or that they couldn't section off Wattpad-endorsed authors into their own mini-category. Do they have to? Of course not. Awards are allowed to run (pretty much) however they see fit. But it seems to me like people might want awards to stop turning away people just because they have a high read count. And it's not like most of our participants were people with high read counts; most of them had less than 10K reads. So even the undiscovered authors we talked to think that awards should be open to everyone.

Okay, so our participants think contests should be open to everyone, but what about shoutout opportunities? Should we only give shoutouts to undiscovered authors? Should we refrain from promoting famous authors? Let's find out what our participants thought.

Okay, so all 107 people thought that it's good to help out undiscovered authors. But what about famous ones?

Still, 67% of our participants think it's good to give a shoutout to a famous author. So, whether the author is famous or undiscovered, it seems like most of our participants would agree it's good to help out!

What about the ones who disagree, though? Do you think it's possible that by promoting the authors who have made it to the top, we're further pushing down the ones who are already on the bottom?

The data says no.

Even more of our participants agreed about this than about the last question. In their eyes, helping a famous author does not hurt an undiscovered author.

Which leads us back to the final graph from the Awards and Promo section. Almost all our participants agreed: It's good to help everyone, no matter how many views or followers they have.

So, now that we know a person's status shouldn't stop us
from helping them—how do we help?