It makes me wonder if a story that's late in a year is more likely to be nominated just because the reader is more likely to remember the story.
Someone else mentioned this theory on IRC recently so I did a little checking on last year's ballot. As it turns out, there didn't seem to be any bias based on when a story was submitted to the Archive -- the stories on last year's ballot were pretty evenly split between those uploaded in the first half of the year and those in the second half of the year. There was some variation, obviously -- categories with only 5 slots had to go 3-2 or 2-3, and there were a few that were 1-4 or 4-1 -- but overall, we were pretty darn close to even.
That's just one year; I haven't gone through past years. But I think it's enough to say that we don't need to give stories uploaded in the first half of the year any special treatment as far as the Kerth go (like making special categories for early-in-the-year stories, etc.) because they seem to hold their own pretty well.
But I definitely agree with Tank's suggestion that the best way to decide about what you want to nominate is to go through the list of eligible stories (which can be found on the Kerths website) and refresh your memory on which ones you liked best.
Oh, but you don't have to have read every single story in order to nominate -- if you loved a story and think it deserves to be honored, by all means, nominate it!
Kathy
