But what about writers who are being asked to pay to have their work considered? Is it a good deal for them?
Obviously, it is not a good deal for writers if the contest is rigged in favor of a friend or former student of a judge, or if the contest ends up awarding no prizes, as happened in a number of highly publicized cases in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of them documented by the now-defunct website Foetry and reported in this magazine’s column The Contester. Since Foetry closed down in 2007, much of the brouhaha over contest scandals has died out, due also to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) instituting the Contest Code of Ethics, which puts forth three criteria—the “intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process”—as the foundation of an ethical contest.
“The best thing a writer can do,” says Jeffrey Lependorf, CLMP’s executive director, “and the easiest thing to do as well, is look at the press and ask, ‘Is this a press within whose catalogue I would want be included?’ and, if there’s a named judge, ‘Is this a writer I respect?’ If a press states that it abides by the CLMP Contest Code of Ethics, and it is also listed in the pages of Poets & Writers, I think a writer should be quite comfortable in trusting that he or she will be entering a legitimate contest.”
But even if one assumes that most writing contests are fair, writers rarely win until after they have submitted to multiple contests, often over a period of years, meaning that, in many cases, winners have already spent a sizable fraction of their prize in entry fees. Iain Haley Pollock, who won $1,000 in the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize competition for Spit Back a Boy (University of Georgia Press, 2011), estimates he spent between $250 and $300 on prize fees before he won. In fact, he laughs when he recalls that when Meyers called him to tell him he had won, his first thought was, “Thank God, this saves me a couple of hundred dollars” in entry fees for other contests.
But of course Cave Canem didn’t simply hand Pollock a check for $1,000; the organization found him a reputable university publisher and bestowed the credibility of past Cave Canem winners, who have included such well-known poets as Natasha Trethewey and Major Jackson, on an unknown like Pollock, who teaches middle school boys at the Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia. “Having those names associated with me has opened doors for me that I think wouldn’t have been opened if I had just published with a publisher on my own,” he says.
For those whose vision of a pleasant workday doesn’t include a classroom full of middle schoolers, winning a contest can be a route to teaching creative writing in a university setting, where jobs are scarce for writers who haven’t published a book. Because contests allow publishers to put out books that might not survive in a true free market, many writers who might not otherwise rise out of the poorly paid adjunct ranks (or might otherwise toil their lives away in a fluorescent-lit
office cubicle) can earn a steady income teaching college students and go on to write the next book.
But as Prairie Schooner’s Dawes points out, contests can be a double-edged sword for emerging writers, especially poets. While a contest often offers a new poet the best shot at publication, he says, winning a prize doesn’t always help the poet publish her next book. “The whole narrative of being an author is, ‘I have a publisher,’” says Dawes, author of numerous books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including most recently Wheels (Peepal Tree, 2011). “Winning a contest doesn’t give you that kind of security.”
This isn’t true in all cases, of course. As Alison Meyers points out, Cave Canem’s publishing partners have often continued to publish the work of its winning poets after their first prizewinning books. For instance, Trethewey, winner of the very first Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 1999, had her winning book, Domestic Work, published by Graywolf Press, which then published her second collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia, in 2002. Only then, after she won prestigious fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2003 and the Rockefeller Foundation in 2004, did she move to a commercial publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which put out her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Native Guard, in 2006.
More often, though, a book prize is a one-off deal, which, as Dawes notes, doesn’t offer much of a leg up when poets have gathered enough work for a second book. “The challenge that they have is they have to enter another contest,” he says. “And I just don’t think that’s a good life, a good writer’s life.” Still, as Dawes acknowledges with a laugh: “It’s worth it because it’s better than not having your book published.”
As Dawes and other contest organizers point out, book prizes do more than simply publish the winner’s book; they confer the prestige of having won a prize, which often comes with the added boost of having been selected by a well-known author who judged the contest. This can put a young poet at the cool kids’ table at a summer writers workshop, but outside the narrow worlds of academia and the writing-conference circuit, does anyone actually care?
Yes and no. Winning a prize “is not a selling point for me in going to a publisher,” says Sarah Burnes, a literary agent with the Gernert Company. “It’s what’s on the page that matters.” Still, a contest award listed in a query letter can make her take a new writer more seriously. “What that says to me is that they’ve done the groundwork of building a literary career,” says Burnes, who represents Shannon Cain, author of The Necessity of Certain Behaviors (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the 2011 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
Book prizes, especially the more prestigious ones, offer other subtle advantages for authors looking to sell a later book. For one thing, a contest judge is often a well-connected author whose judgment can carry weight with the agents and editors with whom the judge works. Also, says Megan Lynch, a senior editor at Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group USA, many younger editors and editorial assistants gunning for a position in the editing ranks keep up with prizes and read some of the winning books, looking for up-and-coming authors whose work might not be known to those higher up the corporate ladder.
In addition, while the general reading public might not keep up with who won last year’s Grace Paley Prize, the people who buy literary fiction and poetry for independent bookstores and the editors who assign reviews for newspapers and online book review sites often do. Book prizes mentioned in an author’s bio, when presented as part of “a string of accomplishments,” Lynch says, can catch the eye of an independent bookseller deciding which books to put in the front window or an editor deciding whether to assign a review of a first novel by an otherwise unknown author. “It can certainly be helpful with all the things we have to do to get the book onto the radar of the people who handle literary fiction,” says Lynch.
So there you are, an unknown writer with a finished book of stories or poems neatly stacked on your desk and a list of writing contests open on your lap. Should you reach for your checkbook and pay the entry fee or hold out for publication by a press that won’t charge a fee for reading your work?
In some ways the answer is easier for poets, whose mainstream publishing options are more limited. Unless your work is showing up in prestigious literary magazines or you have a connection to the editors at a press that publishes poetry, writing contests probably offer the best way to ensure that your work will at least get a fair reading.
For a short story writer in the same position, the question can turn on whether you have a marketable novel in the works. Many publishers will take a risk on a book of stories, even if they suspect they will lose money on it, if the author has written a novel they think will sell. But even if you are working on a novel you think can sell, entering a writing contest remains a relatively low-cost way to get your work read and to potentially build a résumé. Because fewer fiction writers who are already publishing books enter contests, your competition in a contest can be lighter than it would be in a traditional submission process.
Still, whether you are a poet or a fiction writer, the odds against winning any individual contest are steep, and while an entry fee guarantees that somebody will at least look at your work, it doesn’t mean he will do any more than read a few pages. Chances are that even if you, like Karen Brown, have two manuscripts’ worth of publishable stories, you will have to do what she did and enter dozens of contests before you win one, and that can get pricey.
But it is worth keeping in mind what that money is going toward. Money spent on an entry fee for a writing contest isn’t like money spent gambling at a casino, where every dollar you lose enriches the casino. Paying an entry fee for a writing contest is more like paying dues on a community project. For each project, the organizers collect the dues, supplement it with money from their funders and consumers, and use it to finance the project—in this case a book. Maybe that book will be yours; maybe it will be somebody else’s. If you don’t care about the project, or if the book only matters to you if it happens to be the one you wrote, then entering contests is probably a bad bet. But this you can be sure of: If you and the other entrants stop anteing up, far fewer of these valuable books will end up being published.
Michael Bourne has published fiction and poetry in numerous journals including, most recently, Potomac Review andOrange Coast Review. He lives in New York City, where he teaches at Fordham University and works as a staff writer for the literary website the Millions.
