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Writing Contests - A Profitable Secret To Win More Prize Cash

By John Yeoman

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 26Mar2011 Word count: 1893 Viewed: 275 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

If you are serious about making money from contests (even if you only want your contest entries to be a profitable hobby), you must organise yourself. It is now your business! Search for contests online, then paste the details of the relevant contests into a database.

To find a good writing contest, make certain to drop in exact search phrases like "writing contests 2011". You will arrive at the most useful sites.

Excel or ACT are sophisticated programs and they take some getting used to. But a Table in Word serves well enough. It lets you do simple sort and search routines, which are useful for keeping your contest deadlines in chronological order and for finding a contest buried in a long list. And the Table utility is easy to learn.

You'll need to set up around six columns: Deadline, Contest name, Prize money & Entry fee, Basic rules (like word length, theme, etc), Contact details, Action Taken and Result.

It's then painless to switch between different windows - the Word.doc Table and your web browser - to fill in more details from each contest site online as required. The Table will also remind you of the deadlines for submission and will make it easy to check periodically the status of entries you've made.

Note: a contest that fails to announce its prize winners after a reasonable period, either publicly and/or to the entrants, should be put on your iffy list for the future. How do you know the prizes were ever awarded?

Moreover, a database can help you to avoid the faux pas of accidentally resubmitting the same story to the same contest once again. (Especially if your story has already won that contest.)

Accelerate your profits with multiple submissions. Here is the secret tip that the top story winners don't want you to discover! It's a proven win-win story engine.

Most contests welcome multiple entries, provided you pay an entry fee for each; nor do they usually try to prevent you submitting the same story to several other contests simultaneously. Nor should they. You own the copyright and, provided you haven't signed a contract with a publisher, you can do whatever you wish with your own story.

We all know how much labor we put into creative writing. It can take days, even weeks, to complete a few thousand words. So don't chance all your work on one wager. Submit the same story several times to as many relevant contests as possible.

Is this ethical? Yes, provided the contest rules don't forbid it.

It's akin to submitting your novel to several literary agents simultaneously. No agent today expects you to make a submission just to one agency at a time then wait patiently up to six months for a form rejection letter (if, indeed, you ever do get a response). Multiple submissions to agencies are now the norm.

Will the contest organisers bar you from submitting your story elsewhere?

Sometimes. Read the rules! It would be very galling to win a prize then have it withheld because the judges discover your story has already won another competition. (In these days of Google and Copyscape, it is quite easy to discover evidence of previous publication.)

Likewise, a contest may require that the story has not been published before in print. Organizers often do this because they want to encourage those writers, in particular, who have published little or nothing to date.

Cheating is very silly

Needless to say, to copy somebody else's story is a no, no. Worse, it's silly. A well-read judge can often spot it. If s/he doesn't, readers almost certainly will when the story goes online.

A contest promoter once received a brilliant entry but something about it made him pause. It used the phrases and syntax of a previous century. A judge read it and exclaimed "de Maupassant". Sure enough, it was a blatant theft, with only negligible editing, of one of his best stories.

There's no harm in borrowing an idea from elsewhere. All writers do it. But if you do it, and submit it as a contest entry, you must be 100% original in your composition!

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