The Importance of Entering Writing Competitions by Julie Ma, Winner of Richard and Judy Bestseller Competition
If you’re reading this newsletter from Cornerstones, I’ll hazard a guess you’re a serious writer who not only loves writing but also wants to be read and enjoyed by people you’re not related to!
The road to publication is different for every single author whose book you see on the shelf although some are more radically different than others. The usual convention though goes something like this:
1. Write a novel
2. Edit that novel
3. Submit the novel to prospective agents.
4. Either get a rejection or never hear from that agent ever again
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until . . .
6. You get an agent.
7. Your agent finds you a publisher.
8. You did it! You are a published author! Now go back and repeat all of the above, omitting steps 3 to 6.
Simple! With blood, sweat, tears and many drafts, you can negotiate steps 1 to 5 but getting to step 6? It’s a lot harder and that’s because it’s not something that’s entirely within your control. Agents receive between twenty and thirty submissions a day. On one of those days, the agent was in a bad mood or had an IT glitch or found herself up against an(other) urgent deadline. As brilliant as any manuscript is, it can be rowing against the tide to get an agent’s approving attention when so many other submissions are trying to do the same.
Is there anything else you can do to get the odds in your favour, to catch an agent’s or an editor’s eye? Well, yes, there is and that is to enter writing competitions. Please note the plural there; you are unlikely to win the very first writing competition you enter.
I know because it happened to me. I braved submissions to the slush pile to no avail. I entered competitions and was never even longlisted. I’d pretty much given up when I decided to give it one last go. I submitted my much-rejected novel to the WH Smith Richard and Judy Search for Bestseller Competition and it won! Happy Families was published, followed by Love Letters.
N.B. Read the terms and conditions in case they want your full manuscript to be sent in (in case you make the longlist). My novel had been written, re-written, edited and re-edited; it had even had a Cornerstones Manuscript Assessment. By the time it met Richard and Judy, it was like Julia Roberts when she meets Richard Gere in the hotel bar in Pretty Woman!
You don’t even have to come first in your writing competition to attract the attention of agents and publishers. Gail Honeyman, Laura Marshall and Neema Shah all found their way to publication even though they didn’t win in their respective competition years.
There’s already lots of excellent advice out there on how to write and edit your novel to be the best it can possibly be, but if I could offer you one tip for your unpublished manuscript, it’s this.
Enter competitions:
Cornerstones sponsors the Bath Novel Award and the Bath Children’s Novel Award, a renowned international writing competition. Take a look at their success page.
