Archive for category Competitions
Write Exposure & Words Magazine Competitions
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on November 14, 2011
Write Exposure has launched its first monthly competition. There are 3 categories – short fiction (up to 1200 words), flash fiction (up to 250 words) and poetry. Entry into each category is £4 or you can enter all 3 for £9.
The winner will be showcased on the website for a month along with 3 other ‘honourable mentions’.
Prize money depends on the number of entrants. I couldn’t find it on the website so I contacted Cheslyn Baker, who is running the competition, to find out the ‘formula’ that would be used to calculate the prize. She told me that it would be 25% of the total entry fee received in each category.
The theme for the competitions will change each month. For November it is “I know your face” and the closing date is 30th November.
Please read the full details here before you enter.
In most competitions we never know what percentage of the entry fees was paid out in prizes so this competition is being transparent in that respect. It is also being open about its judging. It will be using a panel of 3, one of whom is a ‘citizen’ judge and any of us can apply to sit in that third seat. See the website for details.
What does anybody think about prize money being 25% of the pot? Is it fair? Can we (the entrants) actually reach a fair conclusion on this question when so many other competitions only advertise a fixed prize rather than a percentage?
There is a lot of work in running a writing competition – including a large amount of administration as well as the actual reading and judging of entries. 100 entries would be required to win £100 – and I’m sure that a lot of competitions offering a prize of £100 receive more than 100 entries so maybe 25% is realistic.
By coincidence I came across another competition recently where the prize money is dependent on the number of entrants. Words Magazine is running a ‘winner takes all’ competition for short stories of up to 2000 words. Entry fee is £3 – so if 100 people enter the prize will be £300 (Closing date is December 31st).
Best of luck if you decide to enter either of these!
Print Express Poetry Competition
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions, Poetry on November 3, 2011
Alex Black contacted me last week and asked if I’d give a mention to the poetry competition that his company, PrintExpress.co.uk, is running. So here goes:
- Entry is free!
- First prize is £150
- Poems can be on any theme and up to 45 lines long
- Entry is via email
- Closing date is November 30th 2011
Full details can be found here
So with nothing to lose in entry fees or postage, even a non-poet like me might enter!
FBFT Sports Writing Competition 2012
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on October 27, 2011
Don’t panic – this is not a competition for a kick by kick account of a football match or an in-depth account of an athletics
Image via Wikipedia
meeting. FreeBetsFreeTips, the organisers, are happy to accept prose or poetry, fiction or non-fiction. And it’s free entry – so no excuse not to have a go.
The prizes are £50, £30 and £20 plus publication on the Free Bets Free Tips website. Word count is 1500. You can write about any subject as long as it relates to sport. The organisers are looking for something exciting, original or even abstract.
Closing date is 13th May 2012 and last year’s winning entries can be read here.
By the way, if you Google ‘Sally Jenkins’ you will discover the Wikipedia entry for an American sports writer. Amongst many other things she wrote cyclist, Lance Armstrong‘s story – ‘It’s not About the Bike‘.
Maybe I should enter this competition and see if I can emulate my namesake’s success in this field…
100 Not Out!
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on October 20, 2011
Yes, this is my 100th post!
When I started out around 12 months ago I wasn’t sure whether I’d have enough material to sustain a blog for more than a few weeks never mind a whole year – but I’m still here!
Blogging becomes addictive (watching those stats go up and down and wondering if you’ve offended somebody when there are no comments on a post) and it generates a feeling of power (I can write what I like without wondering if it will get rejected by some picky editor).
I’ve found some lovely people online (but I’ve never met you – so maybe you’re really all mad-axe murderers waiting for the right moment to strike!) as we cross-pollinate each others’ blogs.
So to celebrate, here are a few competitions mentioning 100 in their requirements or winnings:
- The Angels and Devils Poetry Competition is offering a first prize of £100 and has a closing date of 31 December 2011
- Each quarter Cheerreader are offering a 100 Euro prize for a humourous short story. The next two closing dates are 15 December 2011 and 15 March 2012.
- Helen Yendall is offering a £15 Amazon e-gift voucher for a 100 word story based on the photo displayed on her blog. Closing date is 31 October 2011.
- And a reminder that Readers Digest are running another 100 Word Story Competition with £1000 first prize. Closing date is 31 January 2012.
Thanks to those of you who’ve been with me since the beginning and a warm welcome to all those who’ve joined along the way. Here’s to the next 100 posts!
Birmingham Book Festival Short Story Competition 2012
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on October 13, 2011
The annual Birmingham Book Festival is currently under way and it includes a short story competition.
The theme is ‘Clocks’ and the story must be between 1000 and 2000 words. The winner will receive £100 plus a writing workshop of their choice (from a program yet to be announced for next spring) and the second prize winner will receive £50. Two runners-up will receive tickets to an event of their choice in the Birmingham Book Festival 2012 ‘Spring Thing’. Each prize winner will also get to read their story at a special celebratory event.
Entry fee is £5 and closing date is 31 January 2012. Full details are here.
Remember – stories with a theme, like this one, attract fewer entrants than ‘open’ competitions – so have a brainstorm and try to come up with something unusual on the theme of ‘clocks’.
Also – until midnight tomorrow (14th October 2011) I am donating £1 to the RNIB for each new subscriber to this blog. Simply enter your email address in the box on the right – it’s free and you can unsubscribe at any time. More information is here.
Poetry, Pictures and Andrew McMillan
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions, Events, Poetry, Successes, Uncategorized on October 10, 2011
On Saturday I went to Morley in Yorkshire to collect my certificate for the Friends of Morley Literature Festival Short
Story Competition. It was a lovely evening which featured Andrew McMillan (not sure if he’s any relation to Ian) reading poetry that had been written for a special project undertaken in conjunction with the Literature Festival.
Four families in the area chose paintings from Leeds Art Gallery to hang in their homes for 3 months. Andrew went out to visit these families and talk to them about how they felt about the art works. He then used these conversations as triggers for poems. Three local schools also chose pictures to hang in their classrooms for a similar project but this time the children wrote the poems with Andrew acting as their mentor.
Andrew has a wonderful way of performing poetry and he brought the children’s colourful language & unusual ideas to life with his gestures, timing and strong regional accent. Similarly, hearing him read his own poems made them so much more vivid (for a non-poet like me) than simply reading words on a page.
So, to be a successful poet do you have to be able to perform with panache and carry the audience with your words? Or can you succeed as a shrinking violet? I imagine that few people buy books of poetry these days and therefore a confident performance is essential to build a following.
The evening continued with a gig by the comedian Arthur Smith (of Grumpy Old Men). He was brilliant but surprised me by including poems (which he knew off by heart) in his act. My favourite was The Mower by Philip Larkin, which is a rather sad tale about a hedgehog.
Also – until midnight on Friday (14th October 2011) I am donating £1 to the RNIB for each new subscriber to this blog. Simply enter your email address in the box on the right – it’s free and you can unsubscribe at any time. More information is here.
Guardian Travel Writing Competition 2011
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on October 6, 2011
A quick glance at the newsagent’s shelves will tell you that there are hundreds more markets for articles than there are short stories. But with competitions it’s the other way around – there are plenty of opportunities to win with fiction but very few contests asking for non-fiction. I’m not sure why this should be but it does mean that if you want to sharpen your article writing skills you should grab every opportunity to submit your work for judging – especially if entry is free as it is in the Guardian Travel Writing Competition 2011.
The competition has six categories and the prize for each is a fantastic holiday. They are as follows:
- The Big Adventure – wins a place on the 20-day Spirit of Shackleton trip to Antarctica
- The UK Trip – wins a stay in a contemporary, glass-fronted cabin (with an outdoor hot tub) in Sherwood Forest
- The Summer Holiday – wins a seven-night summer break in Cancún in Mexico
- The Short Break – wins a trip to the beautiful city of Aosta in the Italian Alps
- The Family Holiday – wins a snowboarding trip to California for a family of four
- Unusual Accommodation – trip for two to Zambia with Wildestate Africa
All the categories require just 500 words about a holiday that you’ve taken in the past year – I’m sure most of us can manage that and then, who knows, next year’s holiday could be all expenses paid! Closing date is 23rd October 2011 and entry is via email.
For full details plus terms and conditions see here.
And don’t forget I am currently donating £1 to the RNIB for every new subscriber to this blog – details here.
The British Haiku and Haibun Awards 2011
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions, Poetry on September 29, 2011
Image via Wikipedia
Most of us a probably familiar with the Haiku poetic form (even if, like me, you can never remember exactly how many syllables there should be) but have you heard of the Haibun?
According to the leaflet for the British Haiku Awards 2011, a Haibun must contain at least 100 words of prose plus at least one haiku, and must not exceed 2,500 words in length. The haibun should be given a title. Examples of Haibun can be found here.
It looks a pretty challenging form of poetry (and prose).
There is £125 first prize in both the Haiku and Haibun sections of the awards. The Haiku section also has two runners-up prizes of £50 and the leaflet states ‘as the number of entries for the haibun category increases it is hoped eventually to bring this into line with the haiku category and award runner-up prizes as well’. I take it that this means there are fewer entries for the haibun – so it may well be worth having a go! Closing date is 31 January 2012 and full details are on the website.
In case you’re wondering, the picture is the grave stone of Yosa Buson, a Japanese Haiku poet.
A Successful Week!
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions, Successes on September 26, 2011
After a dearth of acceptances over the summer months I’ve had four bits of good news in three days:
- Writers’ Forum have accepted an article that I first pitched to them back in July.
- I have a short story in this week’s Weekly News (dated 24th September). Thanks to Julia for letting me know it had been published and to Helen Yendall, my writing buddy, for giving the story the once-over before I sent it.
- I have won the Friends of Morley Literature Festival short story competition. This was a free to enter competition (which we like!) with a £50 first prize. There is also a prize-giving in Morley, near Leeds – I’m still working on the logistics of attending that. The 2012 short story competition is now open and entry forms are available via email from the organisers. Details are here.
- I have been asked to write for the Work Your Way magazine website. I mentioned this magazine on my blog a couple of weeks ago. It’s a new publication aimed at entrepreneurial/self-employed mums.
So at the moment my head’s buzzing and I feel great! But now I need to get some more work out there in the hope of getting this ‘high’ feeling again in the future. So I’m trying to learn from these acceptances.
Writers’ Forum taught me not to be afraid to chase an editor if he doesn’t reply to a pitch within a reasonable time – the summer holidays meant time was short and things were overlooked.
The Weekly News story was written from a male point of view and involved sport. This may have increased its chances of success in a publication read by both sexes.
My competition win shows that there’s nothing to lose and everything to be gained by sending off an entry to a free competition. For more free competitions check out Patsy Collins’ blog.
The offer from Work Your Way came about because once I’d had one article accepted by the magazine, I went back to the editor with another idea before she had time to forget who I was! Now I have to get my thinking cap on and come up with several more ideas – it feels quite scary to be put on the spot!
Writing Competitions – the way to win
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Books, Competitions, Resources on September 19, 2011
In my quest for success I’ve started reading ‘Writing Competitions – the way to win’ by Iain Pattison and Alison
Chisholm. It covers short story, poetry and article writing contests.
Chapter 2 deals with targeting the right sort of competitions to increase your chances of success. Iain and Alison advise a few ways of doing this:
- Forget the big internationals and concentrate on small competitions that will attract fewer entrants. Not many of us are likely to get anywhere in something like the Bridport but we might stand a chance of being placed in a local writing competition. I would much rather win a book token in a small competition than see my entry disappear into the black hole of well-publicised literary contest.
- Choose a competition with a difficult theme – this will put many entrants off because it’s too much of a challenge and a previously written story can’t be recycled to fit the subject. Competitions with an open theme attract the most entrants.
- Try competitions where entry is limited by the rules – for example competitions restricted to unpublished writers or to writers of a certain age or to those living in a specified area
Iain and Alison also advise targeting contests where the entry fee is high compared to the prize fund. This is because we are all naturally mean and therefore the number of entrants will be low. I’m afraid my own natural meanness won’t let me endorse this advice but I can see that there is logic in this method of choosing where to send your work. So if you’re not as tight with money as me, you might want to try it.
And speaking of relatively small competitions (& I don’t mean that in a derogatory way), Bev Morley is running a short story competition on the theme of ‘Christmas’ via her blog. First, second and third prizes are £50, £25 and £10 respectively plus publication in a Kindle anthology, up to 12 further stories will also be included in the anthology. The word limit is 3,000 and closing date 30th September. Entry by email only and the fee is £3. Full details are here.
‘Writing Competitions – the way to win’ is worth a read if you want to increase your chances of success in competitions.
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