Questions: BONUS on contests

Check back Friday afternoon for the giveaway winner. Meanwhile, a Venetian (maybe?) weighs in…

Serenissima asks:

If it’s not too late to ask a question, I’d be curious to know how an aspiring writer decides which contests to enter, i.e., is there a quick way to see which ones have the most winners who end up with contracts? I’ve been searching out contests and googling the winners, but it’s a slow process and doesn’t usually reflect winners who’ve been signed but not published.

Um, I’m probably the wrong girl to ask here. I’m pretty jaded about contests. I entered, oh, two dozen? Finalled in more than a half a dozen, won two, and got a request from… wait for it: one. NOT one I’d won. NOT one that resulted in a sale, or even a revision request. The two I won? One had no request attached, the other had a judge who’d just sent me a very nice rejection letter. Before judging. (Pretty jewelry and plaque, though.)

Then I got frustrated with the whole contest system and decided to write a book designed to do poorly in contests. (It had a prologue, footnotes, first person POV, a very sarcastic heroine who right up front lists all the men she’s slept with…all of which I knew were going to get dinged by some of the contest biddies.) I got four agent requests, three offers, and sold it at auction a week and a half later. Go figure.

There are two problems with this question:

1. The supposition that a list of contests where the winners end up getting signed/contracts down the line is a useful statistic. Unless the contest has a contract as a prize, it’s unlikely that there was any connection. Here are three contests where the winner gets a contract as part of the prize: Malice Domestic (St. Martins Mystery), American Title (RT/Dorchester), and Gather.com (S&S). I’m not going to speak about whether or not these kind of contests are a good idea. Others have done it at greater length and with more knowledge on the subject than me. Google that.

Most of the contests out there like to advertise when their winners get contracts and sign, but that’s more correlation than causation (because hey, the winners are usually pretty good). For instance, there’s a contest out there right now that is advertising that the winner signed with such-and-such agent. What they aren’t mentioning is that the agent wasn’t a judge of the contest and the author had her full manuscript on the agent’s desk before she finalled in the contest. Which is not to say that this contest isn’t a great one. It is. I love it. I’ve entered it, I’ve judged it. The judges are great, the feedback is top notch, the prize is pretty freaking cool! But I’ve also been a contest coordinator, and I know how the PR works.

2. That a contest is a good way to get signed/a contract. It’s not. See above. Look, I know a lot of writers. A lot. And out of all the authors I know, I can think of maybe half a dozen or so who got their first contract as a result (even an oblique result!) of a contest. Most of those entered Lori Foster’s Brava Novella contest. (I don’t think Lori runs it anymore, but I do think there are other Brava authors that do. Alison? HelenKay?) The others are Janice Lynn, whose book Jane Millionaire won the first American Title, Karen Lingefelt, whose book True Pretenses was a runner-up in the forebear to the AT that RT used to run, and my dear friend CL Wilson, who entered and won a dozen or so contests over the period of a decade before she finally found a final editor-judge who not only loved her masterful, extraordinary, exquisite Tairen Soul, but ALSO wanted to publish it. (No lie: read the whole story here.)

Sidenote: The first two books of Tairen Soul: Lord of the Fading Lands, and Lady of Light and Shadows, are out this fall, and really, they are two of the best books I’ve ever read in my life. Or two parts of one of the best books? It’s a Lord of the Rings kind of thing, being volumes of one epic. Still, amazing. Preorder now.

And maybe one or two who signed with an agent who’d read their work in a contest, though at least one of those was already published and was shopping for a new agent.

Most people get agents and publishers by starting with query letters. Really really really really really. (Do I sound like a broken record on this topic? I apologize.) As I was telling a friend the other night, the most common thing to get out of a contest win is bragging rights on your query letter. If you’re lucky, said bragging might persuade the agent to get to your submission a bit faster.

Now, having said all this, there are some contests that are better known than others, by which I mean that bragging on those is going to sound a hell of a lot better. No point in putting down that you won Podunk 2007 if the agent has never heard of it. And it depends on genre. For romance, you’re looking at The Golden Heart Contest, which is run every year by the national organization. I’ve heard that earning the right to put “current Golden Heart finalist” on your query earns you a quick trip to the top of the submissions pile. (Please note: this only works if you really are a finalist.) Even after I’d burned out on contests, I still entered that one. RWA chapters also have a few regional contests that are very highly regarded, but that will vary by year and who you talk to. Some perennial favorites include the Maggie and the Jasmine, but then again, I may be biased in saying that because I won the former and finalled in the latter back in 2004. By contrast, I totally bombed in the Emily (worst scores EVER) but CL swears by it. (I also regularly bombed in the Golden Heart. See the whole sordid tale here.)

For a genre that isn’t romance? I don’t know. By the time I stopped writing romances, I’d moved away from entering contests. I assume that having a Hugo or Nebula-nominated short story might be a good step on the path towards getting an agent/publisher for a novel (though, of course, you have to first get the short published), but someone more versed in that world (yes, Justine, I’m talking to you) may want to weigh in on that. And while we have Justine here, perhaps she’d like to talk about YA? Because I have no clue.

What I do know is that if you are entering contests to get a contract, you’re going the long way ’round. When I was entering contests, I often did it to get my work in front of a particular judge. That’s how I usually picked my contests. Wanted Abby Zidle to read my work, so I entered the 2004 Jasmine. Wanted Lucienne Diver to read my work so I entered the 2004 Molly. I finalled in both, and before they read the work in question, they’d already rejected it through the usual submission process. Then I figured out that I was actually pretty good at writing queries, and they were cheaper and quicker than contests, to boot. (Oops. That darn record keeps skipping, doesn’t it?) 😉

Cue the dozen comments about or from writers who got agents and editors through their contest entries. I applaud you guys and I’m honestly and from the bottom of my heart happy that it worked for you. And I don’t disagree that it worked for you. But I think you’re in the minority.

The best quote about contests I’ve ever heard:

“Winning a contest means something, but not winning means nothing.”

A lot of really great manuscripts are not going to do well in contests. They’ll maybe do worse than a mediocre manuscript in many instances. Here’s how:

Say you’re grading on a scale of 1-10. One judge loves this manuscript, gives it a 10. Another judge hates it. The voice is so strong, and it breaks some “rule,” or it offends her (maybe she doesn’t like sex, or swear words, or prologues), or just moves her in a way she doesn’t want to be moved. She gives it a 1. (This happens. Trust me.) Your final score on this manuscript is a 5.5.

Another writer enters. Her manuscript doesn’t suck, but it’s nothing special either. The first judge thinks, “Meh.” But she’s a nice lady, and she can’t find anything WRONG with the entry, it just doesn’t push her buttons. She gives it a solid “C” score of 7. The other judge feels the same. Well, this “meh” entry just knocked the one that elicited strong feelings out of the game.

And yet, editors will publish books that some will love and some will hate. They’re much less likely to publish books that no one particularly likes.

Which leads me to my other favorite quote about contests:

“I’d rather get low scores than mediocre scores. At least I know I got a strong response.”

I got great stuff out of my contest experience. I got judges offering to introduce me to their editors, I got amazing feedback on my work from extremely talented writers, I got bolstered confidence and, yes, some bragging rights on my query letters. But I also got some of the weirdest ass comments you ever did see:

“Heroes need to be alpha!” (Oh yeah? Someone tell Brandon.)
“You can’t have sex in chapter one.” (Party pooper!)
“You can’t have a paragraph with only one line.”

Oops. 😉

And many, many more. Of course, none of those hold a candle to the comment a friend of mine once got, and she knows what I mean, and can share here if she pleases.

But I digress.

(See? there I go again with those one-liners! I’m incorrigible!) My final point is, if you want to enter contests, go for it. Enter the most prestigious ones, or the ones with the best feedback, or — as certain friends and I have been known to do — the ones with the best jewelry as prizes. Because, jewelry? Shiny.

But one thing that I beg you not to do is to let your trip on the contest circuit derail you from your pursuit of publication. And do not let the slings and arrows of stupid judges make your work the result of bland committee input. Because there are also a lot of folks out there who have seventy (no exaggeration) contest finals on their C.V. and no publication credits to their name. Some of those folks may honestly be writing something that the market is shy about but readers are going to love once it’s published right (like CL’s gazillion page — amazing, wonderful, beauteous, fabuloso– fantasy), but many more are either using contests to distract them from actual submissions or worse, polishing that one chapter and forgetting that the whole book needs to work.

Okay, I guess I did have a lot to say about contests after all. But you know what? I bet the people in the comments have even more to say:

What has your experience been with writing contests? Any recommendations? Warnings? True stories from the trenches? Which ones do you think are the best?