michaeloppen said:
I never enter contests that charge fees. I think I've posted my reason in the past, but I'll repeat it because it's so sensible.
Most contests have modest fees - say $10. Most of us can afford that, so what's the big deal? Why shouldn't you enter one now and then?
My response is to ramp up the argument by a factor of 100. Most of us could pay $10 for a contest, but would you pay $1000 to enter a hundred contests? Remember, your chance of winning is still tiny; contests receive an avalanche of entries. How many of you out there would write that check?
Contests aren't a matter of luck, but of skill. At least, the good ones are. It isn't like buying a lottery ticket. Using the word "odds" really doesn't apply at all.
If the contest is a good one, it makes just as much sense to pay a ten dollar entry fee as it does to pay twenty or thirty dollars for material to submit your novel. Or to pay for submitting stories to magazines where the "odds" are far worse, and the competition is teh best writers in the world.
By your logic, you should never pay money to submit a story to a top magazine. The competition is many times tougher at good magazines because you have the best writers and biggest names in the world going against you. Most often, the competition in contests is amateur competition, and while some of these writers will be very good, the talent and skill level almost never approaches the level you face with good magazines and book publishers.
As for an "avalanche" of entries, I don't know of a single contest that receives nearly as many entries as the average paying magazine. Some magazines receive 30,000 manuscripts a year, and even a "small" magazine with a circulation of under 25K will usually receive close to 1,000 manuscripts per month.
Worse, very few paying magazines publish more than one new writer each issue, and many may not publish more than one or two new writers per year.
With paying magazines, you're really competing against the top 4% of all submissions. Nearly 100% of all stories magazines buy come from 4% of submissions, mostly from pro writers with lots of serious credits and significant name recognition. With contests, however, you're usually competing against the top one half of one percent of all submissions, mostly from amateur writers no one has ever heard of. The overall talent and skill level is simply much lower in the vast majority of contests.
"Odds" really is the wrong way to look at it. But if you insist on "odds," then if you're good, your "odds" of winning a contest are far better than your "odds" of being accepted by a good magazine. "Good" often isn't good enough with paying magazines. And you will, on average, spend many, many times that ten dollar entry fee in submission costs long before you get accepted by a top magazine or a mainstream book publisher.
But the better contests absolutely can give a writer the boost he or she needs to break the good magazine barrier, or the mainstream publisher barrier.
I doubt very much there are a hundred good contests out there, I doubt there are half that many, but if there were, and if I were a new writer, I'd write that check and mail it so fast the ink wouldn't be dry when they received it.
If you really want to put the "odds" in your favor, good contests are definitely the way to go.
