Contests with no submission fee

by Karen
(China)

Please help me out here, I'm pretty disillusioned with this.

There used to be a time when entering short story competitions was easy - you mailed/emailed it off and if you were any good they let you know, if not, sorry. My previous editors and other publishing contacts before used to tell me that, when it came to submitting to orgs/associations etc, paying an entry fee was a thing to be avoided. Now I can't find a single - and I mean not ONE - competition that doesn't require a submission fee, from minimal to utterly exorbitant.

I'm in a bit of a special case here in that I'm a native English speaker (and writer of course - well, trying to be) living in China of all places. I've been here for years now, have never owned a credit card or any such international payment device (and in China that's pretty normal), I have no more contact with my bank in my native country and so pretty much have no means whatsoever of acquiring one.

WHAT does a person like me do when they want to get back out there, beyond just shrugging it off and scribbling away to themselves in the dark for the rest of their lives?

In short (and apologies for rambling like this but I'm pretty annoyed), do you know of ANY short stories that do NOT demand money out of the writer's pocket just for the chance of being read?

And why, if I may ask, have things fallen to this in the first place? How many other writers are there in the world being stifled by this thing?


Apologies again and thanks if you do reply - I really do want to know what's going on here, and I would love to find a pocket-friendly competition I could enter into.

ANSWER

Hi Karen. I can see the difficulty you face. There are still a few contests with no submission fee, but they are getting rarer all the time, and the prizes are generally small. This is a result of the sheer number of entries, and the cost of getting anyone to read the entries.

At one point, a couple of people could easily read through the entries in a day, but with everyone being so busy these days, it's much more difficult to find qualified readers. So the contests use the submission fee to offset the costs of administration and reading. I address this more in a previous question and answer. To read that response, Click Here.

Also, consider simply sending your stories out for publication to regular markets, rather than to contests. You might submit your short story to Page Forty-Seven, the online anthology on this site, for example. It's a paying site and costs nothing to enter: http://www.be-a-better-writer.com/short-story-submission.html

You might also consider getting a PayPal account to transfer money on the web. PayPal is as secure as any bank and allows you to make purchases or payments.

Also, a search on the Internet for contests with no submission fee will still turn up a few, such as the ones at Fiction Factor.