Publishing Unfinished Guides: Authors Perspective

For the less experienced guide writers let me explain why it's in your best interest to not publish your guide until it is at least "mostly" complete (I recommend 100% but 98% is close enough I suppose).

If you publish an incomplete guide a few things will happen. First your guide will be found and rated by the most passionate members of the community. They will vote against your guide as its not helpful in its current state. Right out of the gate you are fighting a slew of down votes and (see below) they will most likely not find it when you update it, so those votes are stuck against you forever. Now the most active members in the community don't like your guide either.

This means (second) you will lose many views to your guide and views = votes so you lose a lot of those as well.

When you complete your guide, maybe its the best damn {hero} guide ever made, but because you published it early you have only a few votes on your guide and they are all mostly negative so no one new is looking at your guide to review and rate it. You just aren't getting new votes.

Thirdly, the first day, week and month are your best chance to showcase your guide, it gets its best exposure it will ever get. If you publish it today and finish it next month, you are off the home page (when we add additional lists) and probably not showing on page 1 of the browse results when its finally worth reviewing! It gets much harder to get viewers if you have a lousy score at this point. The best time for your guide to be seen, it wasn't worth seeing. Now that it is, its not being found.

Your guide is now doomed and it all started with jumping the gun and publishing it too soon.

You are free to publish your guide whenever you see fit, its your work but I hope this helps explain why it's actually in the authors best interest to wait.


FlashJ

^ What he said.

This this this this.

Cannot..Agree..More!

Not to mention that you can save your guides without publishing them...really no reason to force out something that isn't ready :/

Write more right guide on how to write plz xD

Only reason why I published my guide was because for some reason earlier, I couldn't see my unpublished guides. If I could, I would avoid doing it and I share similar sentiments to OP. :|