A Free Legit Writing Contest

 (entrance...get it?)

Readers of this blog know that for a brief period I fell into the trap of entering writing competitions. While I wasn't foolish enough to enter the big bucks contests, I was willing to pay $60-$75 a couple of times. Stupid! My God!

Surprisingly, there are a ton of writing contests out there, but many are super-specific about eligibility. Too, there are a ton of contests that aren't worth the time it takes to enter and are especially not worth the entry fee. If the grand prize is a digital sticker, well, just go ahead and create your own sticker and put any words on it you want. ("Best Author in the World!"...or something equally laudatory.) 

Even the legit, highly regarded competitions are a crapshoot at best. If you write literary fiction, they might be worth your while and dollars to enter. Genre fiction? Not so much. And unless you win The Booker Prize or the National Book Award, nobody is going to care, least of all potential readers. I'm not sure potential readers even care about the big awards. Sometimes those have the exact opposite effect. You'd at least get lots of publicity, though. I had a Booker Prize winner contact me on Instagram once. He just wanted to talk about writing and how mine was going, and then he offered to share the contact info of his publicist with me. So nice! Oh wait, he was an imposter. Shoot.

There is one competition that's legit and FREE and even offers benefits just for entering. It's the Indie Author Project Annual Contest. Just by entering, you are pretty much assured that your book will be included in the Indie Author Collection that's available to libraries in the US and Canada. (They do vet the books, but I've never had one rejected. As long as it's not a low content or AI-written book, inclusion is essentially assured.)

A couple of points I appreciate about it:

1. Well, it's FREE.

2. There are no publication date restrictions, so I can enter the same book every year, if I want.

3. My book will be offered to libraries.

4. There is a decent cash prize, although that is more relevant to authors other than me.

Entries are now open (as of April 1) through May 31.

And if you happen to be a resident of Minnesota or Illinois, you can enter the state contest, too. I do live in Minnesota, but my state is quite snooty and hyper-political, so my chances are slim to none, but again, it's free to enter, so why not? (Ooh, why did I include that line in my novel about a song not being feminist?) 

You need to have an ePUB or PDF version of your book, but you should have that anyway, for ARCs and what-not. If you're looking for an easy, free way to create those files, download calibre.

So, hop to it! 🐰 I haven't yet hopped, but I'm planning to do so in the next couple of days. Yep, I'm entering the same book as last year, but at least now it has a better cover. (Think that doesn't influence judges? It does.)

I will note that my entry last year didn't find its way into the Indie Author Project Select Program, and a quick scan of the books that did confirms my suspicions about women's fiction. All the books I looked into are about failed marriages. Check that; one is about an open marriage. Why, oh why don't I choose some other category? I'm starting to realize that women's fiction is not about happiness.

Anyway, I won't be deterred. Maybe once I get to the genre selection portion of the entry I'll find a more appropriate category. Probably not. Still doing it, though.

Good luck to all who enter!

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