Writing Contests - How To Earn A Reliable Spare-Time Income From Your Words

Can you truly win writing contests and bank a sizeable sum every month, simply from your contest wins? Yes, it's true. And you can comfortably make a five-figure dollar income every year - without having to publish your stories anywhere else.

However, to earn a reliable paycheck from writing contests you need to become professional enough to regard your stories in a cold-blooded way as commercial 'products' - and to adapt each one exactly to a given contest.

That's a tough one! Many writers start out by writing for themselves and only later trying to sell their stories. That's okay, if you write just for pleasure. But if you want to win competitions - or publish your stories commercially - it's the wrong approach.

To make serious money, you must adapt your work to your customer. In this case, it's a contest judge.

Adapting a story for a commercial purpose is a difficult lesson for any new author to master. But it's worth it.

There's a lot of profit (and pleasure!) in winning story contests.

You can craft your fiction 'products' at any time or place you choose, whether it's your lounge chair at home, or travelling, or just lying on a beach. (Chances are, your contest earnings will finance a few very nice holidays each year.)

And you can engage your writing contest machine, if and when you like.

What's more... send stories to contests systematically and you will develop a treasury of stories that you can also sell in their own right. They may lead to your more 'important' work, like a full-length novel, being accepted by a publisher. So your fiction will become profitable yet again.

Submitting to contests is like starting in a university of creative writing. You will develop your craft expertise, painlessly, with every entry you submit. But you don't pay this 'university' - at least, little more than a few dollars a month. Instead, it pays you!

Above all, you will enter an enchanting new world: the company of dedicated fellow authors.

Untold thousands of writers run their own web sites or blogs. It doesn't matter where your home is, you will always be warmly welcomed in this fabulous community. On the web, everyone starts out equal.

Equipped with merely a few contest wins, you can approach this companionable society with poise and excellent references!

Thousands of contest offers

Well above 2100 contests every year are announced on the web, throughout the world, for short stories in English. No contests 'compete' with each other, and few require exclusive submission. So you can enter as many contests as you wish.

That awesome number does not include contests for novels, scripts, poetry, or other creative works, or those awards granted by organizations to recognize materials already in print, or the innumerable contests - often local - that never find their way onto the web.

You will never discover every one of the contest opportunities in any one list, online or otherwise. Directories, whether or not published on the web, will note only the most prominent award schemes or those announced in their own regions.

To stay abreast of the new contests, seek them out world-wide. New contest directories pop up continually on the web.

Where to discover the best story contests

Do a regular 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 year you're interested in eg '2012'. (Otherwise you'll be swamped by old data.)

Why use several search engines? Google may bury a useful contest in, say, page 21,000 of its list but Yahoo or Bing will display it in the front. And vice versa. Dogpile arranges its results in an entirely separate manner. It will show you a different sequence.

Don't forget, many good contests may be hidden very far down in the web.

So arrange your contest writing as a business, do your research... and you might well be en route to achieving a major 'spare time' income every year. Doing what comes naturally!


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Dr John Yeoman, PhD Creative Writing, is founder of writing contest ideas center Writers' Village. A university tutor in short story writing, he is a veteran contest judge. Discover a wealth of clever tips to win cash prizes in writing contests in his practical manual How to Win Writing Contests for Profit. Acquire it entirely free now at:
http://www.writers-village.org/ideas