Competition Nitpicks

by Sally Quilford

One of the regular complaints coming from those who organise writing competitions is a lack of entries. The dearth of entries either mean competitions fail to make enough for the prize fund or don't have enough entries from which to choose a good batch of winners. I decided to ask regular competition entrants what bugs them about competitions and, more importantly, what puts them off entering.

One of the biggest bugbears among the writers I spoke to was ambiguous rules that don't make it clear what the organisers mean by 'published' or 'unpublished' writers or stories. Or there may be other confusing rules. One annual competition has the final mystifying clause: 'If the rules don't say you can, then you can't'. One presumes that entrants are supposed to take a mad guess at the unspoken rules. Even if the rules and conditions are clear, some entrants say that they're often spread out over several pages on a website, which makes it easy to miss something important.

Added to this complaint were the competition organisers, who when approached with queries about the competitions, fail to reply. In fact, all round lack of communication from organisers was another big concern. We dealt last month with competitions that fail to find winners, but more annoying to our writers than that are competitions that fail to announce anything, or take far more time than promised to find the winners. For writers this means their work is out of circulation for longer than they expected. I've entered a couple of competitions over the past couple of years where once the closing date had passed, the competition was never mentioned again.

Giving up copyright was another concern. Quite a few competitions lately have included a clause, which states that all copyright to the winners' work - and in some cases this is extended to every entrant - belongs to the organisation in perpetuity, and for any medium in which the organisation chooses to use the work, which includes film rights and merchandise. Not only will you receive no payment for this, you can never use that entry anywhere else. New writers may not understand the implications, or be so eager to be published that they ignore them. My advice would be to avoid competitions that ask you to give up copyright. It's perfectly acceptable to give 'rights' to a piece of work so that the organisation can either publish it in a winners' anthology or on their website but you need to be sure exactly what rights you're giving up before you enter, and that those rights will revert to you either immediately or after a reasonable time period.

Writers also raised concerns about competitions where the only prize is publication on a website, or where runners up and shortlisted entries are posted on the website, which denies the entrants the option of sending them elsewhere because so many outlets now consider work to have been published if it appears on a webpage.

Other complaints by our writers were competitions where the entry fee is very small compared to the entrance fee; competitions that are clearly a way for someone to sell anthologies and competitions which fail to offer a choice of payment options. One particular bugbear was competitions that extend the closing date in the hopes of getting more entries, giving one writer the impression that what she'd sent in by the original closing date wasn't good enough. Another writer was particularly unimpressed with competition judges who write negative adjudications, even about the winning entries, "They just sound so grumpy about it all!"

The above may just sound like writers having a good moan, and it's true we do like to have a bit of a grumble when we get together, mainly because we have to be so careful what we say publicly. But if writing competitions are to survive and keep getting those entries, I think it's important that the organisers take the entrants' feelings into account. Full marks to Fish Publishing, who when they had to cancel three genre competitions recently, offered entrants the option of either having their fees back, or automatic transferral of entries to Fish's annual competition. And all this was achieved within one week of the closing date. They're not alone in doing it right. There are many competitions that treat their entrants with the utmost respect. Unfortunately there are a small minority who somehow manage to get it wrong. If they listen to their prospective entrants' concerns, they might well find they get more entries.