Should You Submit to Writing Contests?
Any writer who regularly sends out their work has no doubt come across a few contests along the way—and some of these don’t come cheap. The typical entry fee I see for contests is in the $10-$20 range, but I’ve seen entries as high as $50 a pop, and it’s fairly common for contests for book-length manuscripts to have entries of $25 higher.
This leads to the natural question: is it worth it? Sure, someone’s going to walk away with a pretty good payday—but that’s true of Powerball drawings, too, and no one’s ever said playing the lotto regularly is a smart financial decision.
Of course, most people wouldn’t say writing in general is a smart financial decision, so maybe that’s the wrong way to think about things. But if it’s not about the money, why do writers submit to contests, and how do you know if it’s a smart choice for your work?
I was thinking about these questions when I was sending out submissions recently. And, yes, I did send to a couple of contests in there, though most of the subs I sent were the standard free kind, and I looked into several contests I ultimately didn’t decide to enter. I thought a blog post clarifying my thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of contests, along with the criteria I use to decide if I’ll submit to them, might be helpful for other writers who are asking these same questions.
The Pros of Contests
#1: It’s a way for unagented writers to send work to exclusive publishers.
Some presses will only consider manuscripts submitted by agents for their regular catalog, and only take unsolicited, unagented submissions through a contest. This is more common for people submitting book-length manuscripts, though there are a handful of literary journals that use this model, too. In these cases, the choice of entering the contest is a bit more of a no-brainer. If you want this journal or press to publish you, and you don’t have an agent, the contest is your only option. This makes contests a potential way for so-called “emerging writers” to access bigger-name markets with more power to launch a literary career.
#2: The odds are often better than the general slush pile.
Yes, prize money is a draw—but an entry fee is also a deterrent. Some writers refuse any form of pay-to-play on principle, so they’re removed from the pool. Others may not quite have $25-level confidence in their work, or may simply have more important things to do with their money.
Publishing is to some extent a numbers game, and the more you can thin the odds the more likely you’ll be to win. I’ll provide some anecdotal evidence here from my own experience editing After Happy Hour, which runs an annual contest. Last year, we got around 100 entries for the contest. In typical free submission period, we’ll get 500-700 submissions. The free subs are used to build the online issues, which are a smidge longer than the print issues built from the contest submissions—I’d say the typical online issue has around 2-4 more works in it than our average print issue. As a ratio, the acceptance rate for the contest is still much higher.
That’s just one example, and AHH is hardly a household name-level journal. Contests can still be very competitive, especially if it’s run by a well-respected market. But you’ll likely be competing against fewer other writers when you submit to a contest than you would be sending through a free, open call to that same publisher.
#3: It builds more literary cred.
Getting stories published in journals is great. I do a happy dance every time it happens. But it’s also not my end goal for my writing. Eventually, I’d love to get my novel, chapbook, and short story collection published, along with the other manuscripts I manage to churn out in years to come.
Publishing short pieces in journals can help with that—editors and agents read those, too, and if they like your style they might even reach out to you instead of you needing to go to them. But winning a contest amps up the value of that past publishing cred. Even if it’s with a lesser-known journal, that’s still telling other future publishers that, not only did another editor choose your work, they thought it was the best thing they’d gotten during that reading period. Winning contests obviously isn’t the only way to get attention from agents or editors, but it can certainly help for anyone who’s looking to build a career as a writer.
#4: $$$.
Okay, sure, we’re all writing just for the art of it and we’re realistic enough not to expect writing to make us millionaires—but, also, getting paid is nice. And yes, you can get paid pro rates from markets with free submissions, but those are limited. They’re also typically large, well-known, and highly competitive—places like Paris Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and other White Whale-worthy monoliths. Many smaller publishers that can’t afford to pay pro rates to every contributor still can to one writer: their contest winner. This makes contests a chance to earn the kind of pay a professional writer arguably deserves.
The Cons of Contests
#1: $$$.
There are a few writing contests that don’t cost anything to enter, but normally they’re pay-to-play. A $10 fee doesn’t sound like that much on its own, but remember that most writers don’t get a “yes” the first time they send their work to a publisher. Usually, you’ll need to send a story out to a few different places before it finds a home. To save time in that process, many writers (myself included) simultaneously submit. If you send a story to 5 places and all of them are contests, suddenly you’re looking at $50 (at least) out of your wallet—and potentially for no return.
Now, some places charge reading fees for regular submissions, too, but these are usually less than $10 for journals, and rarely over $20 even for book-length publishers. There are also those aforementioned paying markets that don’t charge for submissions, so if your goal is to make a profit from writing, those are probably the better way to go about it.
#2: It can take a long time to hear back.
With open submission calls, the editors will normally read through them on a rolling basis, accepting the things they like and rejecting the ones they don’t as they come in. With a contest, though, they often don’t make final decisions (or at least don’t share those with submitters) until after the contest has closed and they have a chance to review all the submissions. Depending on how early in the contest reading period you submit (and how on top of their shit the editorial staff is), that could mean waiting 6 months or more just to get a form rejection.
#3: You can’t always take stylistic guidance from what they’ve published before.
Conventional wisdom is to read things the market has published in the past to get a sense for what the editors look for. That’s not always going to hold true for contests, though. While it’s usually the same core readers doing the first culling from the slush pile, many contests bring in guest judges to make the final selections. This can make it more of a crapshoot because it’s harder to get a sense of what that judge will look for in the pieces they select.
My Criteria for Submitting to Contests
Everyone has different goals for their writing, so the things I look for when I’m submitting work might not be the same things you want to get out of it. That being said, these are the things I look for when I’m considering whether a contest is worth the entry fee.
#1: I get something tangible out of it.
It’s much easier to send a press or journal money when you get something in return just for submitting. For example, if entry to the contest comes with a subscription to the journal, if all submitters get a copy of the book when it’s printed, or if the editors will send feedback to the entries they reject. Basically, I’m more likely to send work to a contest if it doesn’t feel like I’m throwing money into the void.
#2: It’s run by a journal or press I’d want to support anyway.
I’m one of those submitters who has been known to click the “tip jar” option even when that won’t get me anything more than submitting for free. As the editor of an independent journal, I know first-hand that shit ain’t free. Many editors are volunteers who donate at least their time, and often pay out of their own pockets to keep the press or journal running. If I love the mission or vibe of the publisher, I’m happy to contribute some money to that cause. If I can view the entry fee as a donation to a press or journal I want to support—plus the bonus of potentially getting a piece published by someone I respect and winning a prize for doing it—then I’m far more likely to submit to it.
#3: The entry fee to prize ratio makes sense.
My minimum rule of thumb for contest entries is that the prize for first place should give a 20:1 return on the entry fee. In other words, if it’s $10 per entry, I look for a first place prize of at least $200. The higher the entry fee, the more important this is to me. If a contest is charging $25 for an entry and first place only gets a hundred bucks, it leaves me wondering exactly what they’re doing with the rest of the money and sets off red flags in my mind.
#4: All submissions are considered for publication/multiple prize tiers.
Ultimately, my goal when I’m submitting to contests isn’t to get the prize—it’s to get my work published. The more works the market potentially chosing to publish from the entries, the higher the odds I’ll achieve that goal. That’s a win in my book, even if I don’t end up getting a big check for it. Again, this is a matter of playing the odds. If I competing for the chance at 4-5 slots instead of just one, then it’s more likely I’m going to succeed and I’m more likely to send an entry.
#5: I’m confident my work could potentially be a good fit for the publisher.
I’ll admit it—there have been times, when sending out regular submissions, that I’ve taken a “fuck it” carpet-bombing approach. I’ve been that asshole who sends work to a journal without reading a word of what they publish just because their website looks cool or I like their covers or some other asinine, poorly-thought-out reason. But I’ll only do that if submissions are free. If I’m sending to a contest, it’s either run by a publisher I already know about or I do my due diligence to thoroughly investigate what they do and who they are before I submit.
As you can probably sense from those criteria, I’m pretty selective when it comes to contests. The higher the entry fee, the more selective I am. It’s hard for me to bring myself to spend more than $20 on an entry, and even that’s pushing it in my mind for a single story—it has to be a journal I really respect, or I have to feel really good about my story’s odds of winning, for me to consider it.
But I have had some success with contests, and have both a contest win (with the journal Cardinal Sins) and a 2nd place finish (with Bards & Sages) under my belt. All told, I’ve probably still spent more in my lifetime submitting to contests than I’ve won, but that’s partially because I was less selective about which ones I’d send to in the past.
Ultimately, it’s up to you whether you want to submit work to contests or not. You can certainly get published without them—the majority of my publications have still been through the good old regular submission pile. But they definitely do have their advantages, especially if one of your goals is to get published in a high-profile journal or with a well-known press.
See similar posts: