Writing Contests - A Powerful Way To Win More Prize Cash

If you find yourself intent on earning cash from competitions (even if you only need your contest entries to be a profitable pastime), you will need to prioritise yourself. It is now your profession! Explore competitions online, then copy the main points of the relevant ones in to a data base.

To find a good writing contest, make sure to use exact long tail keywords like "writing contests 2011". It will bring you the best results.

Excel or ACT are professional programs and they take some adjusting to. On the other hand a Table in Word.doc will serve very well. It enables you to do simple sort and check operations, which are usually useful for storing your contest due dates in chronological sequence along with finding a competition buried in a rather long collection. Additionally, the Table feature is not hard to master.

You will need to arrange about six columns: Deadline, Competition title, Prize cash & Entry payment, Elementary terms (like word length, subject, and so on), Contact details, Action Taken and Final result.

It is later simple and easy to switch between several windows - the Word.doc Table plus your browser - so that you can complete additional information provided by every different award site on the web as required. The Table will also remind you of the deadlines for submission and will ensure that it is very easy to examine routinely the situation of submissions you have done.

Note: a contest that fails to declare its award winners after a fair time period, either openly and/or to the contest entrants, needs to be put on your dubious list for the future. Can you be sure the cash payouts were ever granted?

Likewise, a storage system can assist you to stay away from the error of accidentally re-entering the exact same tale to the same contest yet again. (Specially when your story has recently won that competition.)

Quicken your earnings by means of multiple submissions. Here is the secret that power contestants don't want you to find out! It's a proven win-win story engine.

Many competitions encourage a number of entries, provided you pay an entry payment for each one; neither will they commonly seek to prevent you posting the exact same tale to many other contests as well. Nor should they. You possess the copyright and, if you have not signed a contract with a publisher, you are free to do whatever you wish with your personal tale.

We all understand how much hard work we put into short story writing. Usually it takes days, even several weeks, to accomplish a couple of thousand words. So don't risk your entire work on a single wager. Present the same story several times to as many relevant contests as you can.

Is this lawful? Without a doubt, provided the competition terms don't prohibit the idea.

It's akin to submitting your work of fiction to many literary agents concurrently. Hardly any agent nowadays expects you to make a submission simply to one particular agency at a time then wait around patiently as much as several months for a form rejection slip (if, in fact, you ever do get a reply). Concurrent submissions to agencies have become the norm.

Could the competition organisers ban you from posting your story in another place?

Sometimes. Investigate rules! It could be extremely irritating to win a prize then have it seized back because the judges find out your tale has already won a different contest. (In these times of Google and Copyscape, it is quite easy to discover proof of previous publication.)

Moreover, a competition may require that the entry hasn't been released earlier in print. Promoters often do this simply because they want to inspire those authors, particularly, who have released little or nothing to date.

Cheating is incredibly stupid

Needless to say, to replicate somebody else's tale is a mistake. Worse, it's ridiculous. A literate judge can frequently spot it. If s/he does not, other people almost certainly will once the story is presented on the web.

A competition organizer once received an excellent entry but something regarding it made him pause. It employed the words and syntax of a prior century. A judge looked at it and exclaimed "de Maupassant". Sure enough, it was a clear theft, with only minimal changes, of one of his classic stories.

There's no harm in borrowing an idea from another writer. All authors do it. Yet if you do this, and present it as competition entry, you must be 100% unique in your composition!

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