Writing Award Success - An Extraordinary Writing Contest Plan For Extra Part-Time Profits

Here's a genuinely original idea that you can adapt at once to make a lucrative writing income in your spare time.

Writing awards are a far more profitable way for you to make money from your creative writing skills than the traditional routes. The conventional method is to submit short fiction to magazine publishers in the hope that the stories will be published and paid for.

The problem is, the paying market for short stories has almost vanished. Few writers today can hope to make a reliable income by selling stories in the way they could in the 1950s.

Now even an excellent story may go the rounds of the market in the traditional way and fail to find a paying home. Every year, creative writing schools churn out an increasing number of writers in quest of fewer and fewer journals ready to accept their work, let alone pay sensible money for it. So what's the remedy?

Short story contests! They're on the increase world-wide, and some award very big cash prizes. Enter the words 'writing awards' or 'short story contests' in a search engine and you'll find no fewer than 2500 contests for short fiction.

And then there are contests being run right now in your local area, by newspapers or commercial enterprises or non-profit bodies with big public relations budgets. Many of these never appear on the web.

Just keep your eyes open and you'll soon discover them.

The great advantage of contests is that few demand total exclusivity in their entries, unlike magazine or book publishers. That means you can enter a substantially similar story to several contests at the same time or in fast succession. So your chances of winning are significantly greater than if you send just one unique story to each contest at a time.

Are multiple submissions ethical? In principle, certainly. It's just like sending your manuscript to several literary agents at one time.

But do check the rules of each contest. You don't want to be blacklisted forever by a major contest because a judge discovered that, contrary to its rules, your story had already been published or won a contest elsewhere.

The secret is to start with one strong story then customize it to each contest as much as possible. Even if contest organizers spot some suggestive similarities between your entry and a story that's won a prize before, they can have no reasonable grounds for complaint. Provided the story is colorfully different!

Maybe you play with the setting, names, character details, expositions or passages of background description, and so forth. Some top contest winners are now - systematically - using the powerful utilities in the latest versions of Word.

The new Search & Replace functions are quite sophisticated. And the thesaurus is better than ever. (You can also plug in an expanded thesaurus, if you wish.)

These utilities are easy to learn. You simply paste in your story and they will quickly suggest hundreds of synonyms for every word or term you have used.

In fact, you can develop hundreds of new variations of the same core story, with a few clicks of a mouse. So every contest can receive a 'different' version, customized to the precise needs of that contest.

True, you'll want to check that the utilities have not garbled your story. Go back and clean up any language that sounds stilted or that's skewed your meaning. Make sure that the story quality has not suffered.

But strangely enough, this process will often produce a far better story than the original - because it introduces you to so many new alternative ways of composing it.

When you change your stories systematically in this way, and submit them to dozens of contests at a time, you have a win-win prize system!


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Dr John Yeoman, PhD Creative Writing, is chairman of the writing awards centre Writers' Village. A university lecturer in creative writing, he is a veteran competition judge. Discover dozens of ingenious plans to gain cash prizes in his practical guide How to Win Writing Contests for Profit. Acquire it entirely free now at:
http://www.writers-village.org/writing_awards