Win Writing Contests - And Make a Five Figure Annual Income

You truly can win writing contests and earn an extra spare-time income in five figures year after year, simply by doing what you truly enjoy - writing stories.

The secret is to submit stories to writing contests, continually and often. Just win one or two competitions month after month and you need never face the despair of being endlessly turned down by literary agents.

The clue is to look at each one of your stories as 'products', individually shaped to a given contest. To win regularly, you must become mercilessly business-like in your attitude.

This is the toughest lesson for a new writer to learn. We all start out by writing to amuse ourselves or perhaps our local writing group. It calls for an entirely new mindset to craft a story for the market.

In this case, our 'market' is the judge of a story competition.

Is it worth all the trouble? Absolutely.

You can make a lot of money - if you approach writing contests professionally.

Just look at the benefits of story contest writing as a pasttime - or even a part-time career. It doesn't matter if you work - at home, commuting to the office or on holiday. You can still write a story. And after a while, you may be able to fund all your holidays from your writing wins.

You'll acquire a story contest dynamo - and you can engage it whenever you need some extra cash.

Here's another plus. In time, you will have collected a wealth of stories. Even if they haven't won big prizes, you can often sell them to magazines. So your writing will bring you yet more cash.

When you enter contests systematically, you'll find you've enrolled in a university of creative writing. Your craft skills will improve with every story you write. And this college will even pay you for your training - in prize wins.

Moreover, you'll evolve into a serious writer and enter the company of fascinating people of your own kind.

You'll discover a wealth of semi-professional writing enthusiasts on the Net, often with their own web sites. They will welcome you into their society of dedicated writers and contest entrants. It's an instant 'community'!

Once you've won contests, your reputation will soar and people will follow your stories.

A wealth of contest profit opportunities

More than 2000 writing competitions appear on the web every year. That's just for short stories in English. There's no limit to how many contests you can enter, provided you follow the entry restrictions which are rarely demanding.

Nor does this total include other genres like plays, lyrics and novels. It also excludes the many contests that are not listed online. You might find them in newspapers or periodicals.

Not-for-profit bodies, universities and commercial firms also mount writing contests with good cash awards.

The easiest way to keep in touch with the myriad contest offers is to do regular web searches. There are new ones every day.

The most profitable fiction contests are rarely the most prominent.

Every few days, take time on the web to hunt out keywords like 'writing contest directory', 'fiction competition list' or 'short story contest'. Do add the year, say '2012', or you'll get back a lot of ancient entries.

But here's a tip: carry out that search in a lot of search engines.

Why use more than one search engine? You'll soon find that Bing, Yahoo, Dogpile, Google, and the rest, will list their findings in a totally different order from each other. What appears at top of Google may be lost in page 200,000 of Yahoo - and vice versa.

Some of the most interesting contests will not appear near the top of a Google list at all. Its search results are based largely upon the number of sites that link to other sites. But Dogpile's logic is more sensible.

If you arrange your story contest machine in a business-like fashion, it won't be long before your part-time interest repays you with a healthy income. And it's a lot of pleasure too!


------

Dr John Yeoman, PhD Creative Writing, is founder of the writing contest ideas center Writers' Village. A university tutor in creative writing, he has been for many years a contest judge. You'll find hundreds of wily strategies to win contest prizes in his practical guide How to Win Writing Contests for Profit. Claim it entirely free now at:
http://www.writers-village.org/ideas