Writing competitions are a great way to inspire yourself to write something new, or even just get you to dust off and edit that old story that’s been sitting at the bottom of your drawer.
Ha! Like anyone stores hardcopies nowadays. That should read: ‘…or even just get you to dig out that old story that is buried deep in the recesses of your computer’s memory.’
But what do you think about entry fees?
We’re looking at hosting a writing competition where the winners will have their stories turned into an audiobook. But before we start planning that, we want to see what you think about entry fees.
There are really only two ways to go with this and here are our initial thoughts on them. We’ll expand on these in future posts, but we wanted to know what your initial thoughts were too.
No entry fee
This will allow the most people to enter the competition. Anyone can have a go. But it can cause issues for the judges if they have to hunt through a haystack of submissions looking for good entries.
This could be mitigated with a first pass by someone other than the judges or harsher entry requirements – state that all entrants need to have been published before. But is that good or not?
Entry fee
This limits down our potential entry base. Now only people who really believe in their work will enter. People who will bet their own money on it. But this has problems. We could be excluding some amazing talent just because they can’t afford to enter. Or, even worse, What if a good writer doesn’t believe in themselves enough to put themselves forward.
And how much should the entry fee be?
What do you think? As a writer which works better for you? Let us know.
Image by Tax Credits and released under the Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 licence.