The Fiction Writing Contest Lottery
On what fiction writing contest should you squander $20? I calculated the return-on-investment (ROI) of several different contests. I have summarized the results in the table below. The return number quantifies the investment in a fiction contest, based on the entry fee, effort to write a story according to contest guidelines, and probability of winning the contest.
| Contest |
Return |
| ReadMe Publishing What If? Science Fiction Competition |
(40) |
| Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award |
(49) |
| Alligator Juniper’s National Writing Contest |
(50) |
| Barry Hannah Fiction Prize |
(50) |
| Fish Flash Fiction |
(59) |
| Newport Review Flash Fiction Contest |
(126) |
| Springfield Writers’ Guild Literary Awards |
(161) |
| Inland Empire California Writers Club Writing Contest |
(409) |
| Bards and Sages Speculative Fiction Contest |
(484) |
| Silver Quill Society Short Story Contest |
(485) |
| Cadenza Open Short Story Competition (UK) |
(487) |
| Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award |
(489) |
| Juked Fiction and Poetry Prizes |
(490) |
| Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction |
(494) |
| Mississippi Review Prize |
(494) |
| Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Award for Imaginative Fiction |
(508) |
| Boston Review Annual Short Story Contest |
(659) |
| Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction Contest |
(810) |
| Fish Short Story |
(819) |
| Earlyworks Press Open Short Story Competition (UK) |
(967) |
| Chautauqua Literary Journal |
(1134) |
| Greensboro Review Robert Watson Literary Prizes |
(1200) |
| American Literary Review |
(1294) |
How should you read this table? Just as you may gain or lose money after investing in a 401K or stock, you can gain or lose your time and money by entering a fiction contest. Basically, you want to avoid contests with a return in red, which represents the effort, expressed in a dollar value, that you lost by writing a story for the contest and paying a fee to enter the contest.