Unceasing and Rigorous Competition*

Honesty is the best policy

Publication is a lottery. With all the layoffs at publishing houses and the many magazine closures we’ve had lately, it is becoming more and more so every day. What’s more, even if you ‘win’ and somebody publishes your work, the ‘prize’ is often rather niggardly. It’s true for books but it is especially true for short stories.

Which is why I have entered a number of short story competitions of late.

A writer whose identity escapes me, recently advised us that if a short story is good enough to win a competition, it’s good enough to be published – meaning, don’t waste your time with competitions, just submit for publication. I’m sure he’s right that the standards are equivalent, but I have noticed that the prizes for short story competitions usually include publication and that the cash prize that goes with it is typically more than most semi-pro magazines normally pay for stories (and sometimes more than the pro magazines pay too.)

It’s possible that the odds of winning a short story competition are lower than they are of lucking-out in the monthly or quarterly slush pile tombola. They probably attract more submissions, after all. However, I also suspect that the big-name authors (those names the magazines are always keen to have on their front covers) aren’t entering competitions. Why should they, when their chances of publication are so much higher if they just send their stuff straight to an editor? And, with those guys out of the way, it gives the rest of us a much better chance.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway. Frankly, I’d tell myself anything on those miserable days when rejections from two mags and an agent all turn up in my inbox together. So all that I’ve just said may be complete bollocks. But it would explain why I seem to be doing alright on the competition front – me, who never won so much as a raffle in my life!

As an up-and-coming author, I’m always looking for ways to raise my profile and to get my work out there. So it is great to see that I’m on a shortlist of three for the Concept Sci-fi Magazine short story competition. If nothing else, my name is there on the page of a magazine I like and respect. It’s also nice (and strange) to think that Sean Williams will be reading my story, since he’s the judge. How else could I possibly have arranged for that to happen, I ask you?

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*All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost – the most legitimate – passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one. (Marquis de Sade)

You’ve gotta love that guy!