Can you truly win writing contests and bank a sizable sum every month, simply from your competition awards? Yes, you can. And you can enjoyably achieve a substantial income every year – without needing to publish your stories elsewhere.
However, to earn a regular paycheck from writing contests you need to become impartial enough to regard your stories in a ruthless way as commercial ‘products’ – and to tailor each one exactly to a given contest.
That’s a tough call! Many authors begin by writing for themselves and only later trying to sell their work. That’s fine, if you write just for fun. But when you want to win competitions – or publish your work for cash – it’s a bad idea.
To succeed, you must adapt your work to your customer. In contests, it’s a contest judge.
Adapting a story for a commercial purpose is a difficult lesson for any new writer to learn. But it’s worth it.
There’s good profit (and fun!) in winning story competitions.
You can produce your story ‘products’ anywhere you choose, from your easy chair at home, or travelling, or just lying on a beach. (Very likely, your contest earnings will finance some great holidays every year.)
And you can turn on your writing contest machine, any time you choose.
Not least… send work to contests systematically and you will develop a treasury of products that you can also sell in their own right. That may lead to your more ‘important’ fiction, like a novel, being taken by a mainstream publisher. So your stories will become profitable twice over.
Entering contests is like starting in a university of creative writing. You will develop your writing skills, enjoyably, with every entry you submit. Yet you don’t pay this ‘university’ – at least, little more than a tiny sum each month. It pays you!
Above all, you will enter an enchanting new world: the company of serious fellow writers.
Endless numbers of writers operate their own web sites or blogs. No matter where you live in the world, you will still be welcomed in this fabulous society. On the Net, everyone starts out equal.
Equipped with merely a few contest wins, you can approach this friendly virtual society with poise and impressive credentials!
A myriad contest prizes to be won
Well above 2100 contests every year are announced on the web, throughout the world, for short stories in the English language. No contests ‘compete’ with the other, and few ask for exclusive submission. So you can enter as many contests as you wish.
That big total does not include contests for novels, scripts, poems, or other genres, or those awards offered by organizations to honour materials already in print, or the innumerable contests – often very local – that never find their way onto the web.
You will never discover every one of the contests in any one directory, on the web or elsewhere. Directories, whether or not published online, tend to note only the most important award schemes or those confined to their own regions.
To stay abreast of the new contests, seek them out world-wide. New contest directories pop up continually on the Net.
How to find the best story contests
Do a periodic search via several different search utilities – Yahoo, Dogpile, etc – dropping in keywords like ‘writing contest list’, ‘fiction contest directory’, ‘story contests review’, and so on, plus the current year eg ’2012′. (Otherwise you’ll be swamped by old data.)
Why use many search engines? Google may bury a useful contest in, say, page 999 of its results whereas Yahoo or Bing will display it in the early pages. And vice versa. Dogpile organizes its results in an entirely separate manner. It will show you a different picture.
Don’t forget, some excellent award schemes may be buried very deep in the web.
So arrange your contest writing as a business, do your research… and you could be on your way to enjoying a major ‘spare time’ income every year. Doing what comes naturally!
