Win Writing Contests – And Decide Your Own Income
You really can win writing contests and earn an extra income in five figures year after year, simply by doing what you love best – writing fiction.
The secret is to enter stories to writing contests, continually and systematically. Merely win one or two competitions month after month and you need never face the heartache of being endlessly turned down by agents.
The clue is to look at every one of your entries as ‘products’, individually shaped to a given contest. To win regularly, you have to become mercilessly business-like in your attitude.
This is the toughest lesson for a new writer to learn. We all begin by writing to please just ourself or perhaps our writing group. It calls for an entirely new attitude to craft a story for the market.
With writing contests, our ‘market’ is the judging panel of a story competition.
Is it really worth all the trouble? Absolutely.
You can earn a lot of money – if you treat fiction contests professionally.
Just look at the advantages of story contest writing as a pasttime – or even a part-time career. It doesn’t matter if you work – at home, travelling to the office or on the beach. You can still write a contest entry. And after a while, you could fund all your holidays from your contest wins.
You’ll acquire a story contest dynamo – and you can switch it on whenever you need some extra cash.
There’s another big benefit too. In time, you will have collected a hoard of stories. Even if they haven’t won big prizes, you can sometimes sell them to publishers. So your writing will bring you yet more cash.
If you enter contests systematically, you’ll find you’ve enrolled in a university of creative writing. Your story skills will get better with every story you write. And this university will even pay you for your training – in award wins.
Moreover, you’ll evolve into a serious writer and join the company of fascinating people of your own kind.
You’ll discover a wealth of semi-professional writing fans on the web, often with their own blogs. They will invite you into their club of passionate writers and contest entrants. It’s an instant ‘community’!
Once you’ve won contests, your reputation will soar and folk will follow your work.
A wealth of contest profit opportunities
Well over 2000 writing contests appear on the web every year. That’s just for short fiction in English. There’s no barrier to how many contests you can enter, provided you abide by the entry rules which are rarely demanding.
This figure excludes other genres like scripts, lyrics and novels. It also omits the many award schemes that are not on the web. You might find them in newspapers and magazines.
Public bodies, universities and commercial firms also mount writing contests with good cash awards.
The best way to keep abreast of the myriad contest opportunities in the world is to do regular web searches. You’ll discover new ones every day.
The best story competitions are rarely the most visible.
Every few days, take time on the web to search for keywords like ‘writing contest directory’, ‘fiction competition list’ or ’short story contest’. Be sure to add the year, for example ‘2012′, or you’ll be returned a lot of ancient entries.
Take this tip: do that search in a lot of search engines.
Why do you need more than one search engine? You’ll find that Bing, Yahoo, Dogpile, Google, and so forth, will list their results in an entirely different order from each other. What appears at pride of place in Google may be lost in page 20,000 of Yahoo – or the reverse.
Some of the most interesting contests won’t appear near the top of a Google list at all. Its search ratings are based principally upon the volume of sites that link to each other. But Dogpile’s logic is more sensible.
If you set up your writing contest machine in a systematic way, it will not be long before your hobby repays you with a comfortable monthly paycheck. And it’s a lot of pleasure as well!
About the Author
Dr John Yeoman, PhD Creative Writing, is director of the
writing contest ideas
center Writers’ Village. A university tutor in short story writing, he is a veteran contest judge. You’ll find hundreds of original tips to win contest prizes in his 7000-word manual How to Win Writing Contests for Profit. Claim it entirely free now at:
http://www.writers-village.org/ideas
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