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Writing Award Success - A Clever Writing Contest Strategy For Extra Spare-Time Income

By John Yeoman

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 25Apr2011 Word count: 1350 Viewed: 520 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

What's the fastest way for an amateur writer to earn a good pay check - and even enjoy a measure of fame - in today's market?

Writing awards are a far more profitable way for you to make money from your creative writing skills than the traditional routes. The conventional method is to submit short fiction to magazine publishers in the hope that the stories will be published and paid for.

The problem is, the paying market for short stories has almost vanished. Few writers today can hope to make a reliable income by selling stories in the way they could in the 1950s.

Now even an excellent story may go the rounds of the market in the traditional way and fail to find a paying home. Every year, creative writing schools churn out an increasing number of writers in quest of fewer and fewer journals ready to accept their work, let alone pay sensible money for it. So what's the remedy?

Take a close look at writing contests that offer a good range of cash prizes. More than 2200 contests can be found every year online and that figure does not include the many thousands that never appear on the web.

They might be sponsored by small magazines, writing clubs, local newspapers or commercial firms intent on some public relations mission. You can find them everywhere, once you look.

The great advantage of contests is that few demand total exclusivity in their entries, unlike magazine or book publishers. That means you can enter a substantially similar story to several contests at the same time or in fast succession. So your chances of winning are significantly greater than if you send just one unique story to each contest at a time.

Are multiple submissions ethical? In principle, certainly. It's just like sending your manuscript to several literary agents at one time.

But do check the rules of each contest. You don't want to be blacklisted forever by a major contest because a judge discovered that, contrary to its rules, your story had already been published or won a contest elsewhere.

The secret is to start with one strong story then customize it to each contest as much as possible. Even if contest organizers spot some suggestive similarities between your entry and a story that's won a prize before, they can have no reasonable grounds for complaint. Provided the story is colorfully different!

The simplest way to adapt a story for each contest is to change the locations, character names, snippets of dialogue, time setting and other secondary elements. Then work through the story to change key words or phrases.

That's tedious, of course. But once you get used to the Search and Replace utility in the latest Word programs, it becomes easy - and fun.

The thesaurus will prompt you with synonyms or alternative terms for every word and phrase in your story. Used with care, it can help you to generate a hundred or more fresh versions of your story, each persuasively original. All within a few minutes.

Of course, you must read every new variation of your story closely or your language will appear clumsy and distinctly odd. Clumsy language does not win fiction contests!

But Search and Replace - plus an expanded thesaurus - can save you a vast amount of time and effort when customizing a story to a specific contest. It gives you a win-win prize system.

And as a bonus, you'll very often find that this close editing process will automatically improve even a 'perfect' story beyond all measure!

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