The Joys of Running Writing Competitions

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Maybe you have entered some writing competitions over the years. In this post I'd like to give you a little insight into the other side - i.e., running them. Through my publishing business, Birdcatcher Books, I have now run five writing competitions, four of them for stories for adults, and one for stories for children. The fourth annual short story competition has just closed for entries. This latest competition ran for three months. We received a total of 77 entries, of which 51 came in the last two weeks, and 20 in the last two days. The last entry came at 10.30 pm on the final night of the competition. Does this tell you something about writers and procrastination? Six entries were disqualified for not following the rules. Three sent stories with word counts way below the minimum required (one 700 words, two around 1200 - the rules said 1500 to 3000.) One sent a poem (really? to a SHORT STORY competition?) One was disqualified for using the F word, which is strictly and specifically forbidden in the rules. And one, after being told three times to return to the competition page and submit his entry on the online form, instead sent it by snail mail. (Sorry, I simply don't have time to be typing stories from hard copy onto the computer because someone didn't follow the rules.) PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, if you are entering a writing competition, don't waste your time and money and the time of the person running the competition by not following the rules. On a positive note, there were some exceptionally good entries. It's really encouraging to see the level of talent that is out there, and great to be able to support that talent through these competitions and the resulting anthologies. Even though I am sometimes driven almost to the point of tearing my hair out over some entrants, all in all the positive outweighs the negative.