To be fair, most of the places that charge a reading fee are places I wouldn’t submit to anyway, even if they were free. I typically do not write what is considered “literary” anything. I write my own version of literary, but I find what society deems as “literary” these days (at least by what is published) to be synonymous with “boring as all hell.”

WOTF, however, is on my hit list.

Yeah, as I a said to Shaun, it’s that 1% chance that’s the tricky point. However, I’ve already won WotF, and that contest is only available to new authors, so I think 1% is a pretty reasonable guess.

The piece I wrote was extremely literary. Like, existentialism, weak speculative element etc… So, yeah, GlimmerTrain is tough, but I still don’t think it’s an unwinnable contest

Your odds of being rejected for 100 submissions are (99/100) to the 100th power, which is about .366. My whole point from the beginning is that 63.4% chance of winning in 100 tries on average, is quite different than saying that you can expect to win in 100 tries.

It doesn’t really matter, anyway, but I just thought I’d try to clear up the confusion about what I was saying.

This is where you said you WOULD win in 100 tries. I see you did contradict yourself later in the same post. I was pointing out that ON AVERAGE you would win in 100 tries, which is not the same thing as saying you WILL win in 100 tries.

And of course disregarding the fact that you have no way of knowing that 1% is even remotely accurate. My chance of winning that contest is 0% because what I value in a story is mutually exclusive to what they value.

I like the idea of doing a cost-benefit analysis, but when the only numbers you have are only based on guesses and not data, I have my doubts about what the benefit of such a cost-benefit analysis could possibly be.

Further, I think you need to take a stats class >:)

In your coin scenario, you have a really good chance of getting a head in one of those two flips. Put it this way: The odds of getting two tails is 1/2 * 1/2, which is 1/4, so you have a 3/4 chance of getting heads in one of those two flips.

Look at it this way. These are the possible flips for two coins:

H, H
H, T
T, H
T, T

In only one of those four, do you NOT get a “head”.

In the GlimmerTrain example, you have a 1/100 * 1/100 * 1/100… to 100 chance of NOT winning, assuming your odds are calculated correctly. This means it is very probable that you will win, but not guaranteed.

That’s not true. By the same reasoning, if you flip a fair coin twice, it will come up heads one of those two times. Which does not always happen.

Anyway, the stats details are a digression, just pointing out that a 1% chance does not suggest success in 100 tries.

However, if your odds of winning at 1% each time you enter, random chance says that you will place in a hundred entries. Not necessarily, of course, if you’re SUPER unlucky, it could take a thousand times, or you could never place.