About Literary Contests
   & The Secrets to Winning Them

In addition to offering prestige to the winners, literary contests also lend prestige to the publishers and organizations that sponsor them. This does not work to the advantage of a contest entrant, but the attendant effort and care to preserve the integrity of the contest and select truly worthy recipients adds to the prestige that an award confers on its winner.

When winners of awards go on to attain further recognition, the prestige attendant to a contest sponsor, usually a publisher, increases further. Other factors also lend prestige to contest sponsors and winning contestants.

Securing a well known literary personality to judge a competition lends prestige to both the sponsor and winner of an award. It also raises some questions about the poetry contest or other literary competition that will be mentioned in the following section on secrets to winning literary competitions.

The Secrets to Winning Literary Competitions

The secrets to winning literary competitions are no secret. They are in fact among the most widely published topics on writing, and do not differ appreciably from the rules for getting published. The most important follow:

Follow the guidelines
Duh!!!? It's surprising how many submissions come across an editor's desk that do not follow the guidelines. Do not trust this to your memory, and check and double check every aspect of the submission you put together for compliance with the guidelines.

Find new publications and contests.
New literary contests usually draw fewer entries than those that have gained wide recognition and prestige. A corollary to this is to enter contests that are not well known or sponsored by literary publications or organizations. The drawback to this is that you may not be able to apply the next principle.

Familiarize yourself with the judge's work
If no judge is indicated, the publication's editorial staff will likely judge the entries. In either case, familiarity with the judge's writing, or the character of the published material and matching your submission to what you learn can help. Then again, this is conventional wisdom and it may not help. While familiarity with a publisher likely makes this a good rule to follow, estblished poets often have a wide appreciation for literary style and are not necessarily flattered by emulation.

In fact, mimicry, especially if badly done, might put a submission to the bottom of a reject stack. Other appeals to the judge's vanity may have greater success though.

Themes, issues and causes that may be reflected significantly in a writer's work and personal life may suggest topics, which, well written, stand the best chance of earning high marks from a judge. Don't look for such themes in the writer's work alone, but in interviews and articles written about the writer as well. Then make sure you know the writer's work and the writing of others on the theme well enough to approach the topic with a fresh outlook.

Avoid contests that name the judge
There are good reasons for this, aside from being freed from the need to do all the research necessary to write to the judge. People who have written to the judge and won in a prior competition will have an edge. More importantly though, former students, and others who may have had the opportunity to present their work to the judge at some time, and received a favorable response from the judge will have an edge that is not based solely on what they know about the judge.

Judges who recognize a submission and associate it with a face or name will have a difficult dilemma to overcome. The strengths and weaknesses inherant in their humanity will make it difficult not to show favoritism. Even those who do not recognize a submission at a conscious level, may be influenced by the same factors that motivated them to reflect favorably on a work that had been presented to them in the past. A clever contestant who trusts the judge's integrity, has the edge in that they can rewrite phrases and passages, and still appeal to the judge.

Contests that prohibit submissions by acquaintences and former students are the exception to this caveat. Or are they? See Foetry.com for some startling exposés that further suggest that contests wheerein the judge is named should be avoided.

Know your craft
Duh, again! This is too obvious, so let's differentiate it from other similar admonitions. Don't be so smug or egotistical about your work that you ever stop trying to improve your craft or expand your repertoire. If you have "found your voice," but don't seem to be getting anywhere, that may be what's holding you back.

Submit your work
Aside from the fact that you can't win if you don't submit, this gem has a few facets. Contests are crap shoots. Any number of factors can influence their outcome, and prevent a well written submission from winning. If you are sure that you are not just being egotistical in your belief that your submission was worthy, submit it again to another contest. Look at what won the contest to which you submitted it, and rewrite it for submission to the same contest again next year (assuming it is judged by the same editorial staff).

Contests are not the only way to win awards. Several publishers confer awards for submissions to their publication that are selected as the best in their genre during a publishing cycle. Some of them, like those conferred by Poetry magazine and the Paris Review, are among the highest paying and most prestigeous awards. Others, while lower paying and less prestigeous, are awards nonetheless, and their winners have bragging rights to them.

Submit especially to contests that do not require a fee. Let's differentiate between these and the free contests. Many awards offered by organizations in the UK do not charge a fee and the modestly higher cost of the postage for submission to these makes them worth the extra dollar.

Free contests, especially those that provide for online submission, may be worth entering for the prize money, but they are not exactly free and you don't want to mention that you entered most of them even if you win. Almost all of them are offered for some ulterior motive, like getting your address or email address to facilitate their effort to get you to part with your money for something else. When you enter these, get a throw-away email account that you can allow to expire after the contest is judged, and recycle the mail you receive from them to minimize the environlental impact.

That's it. Good luck!

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