I spotted this link over at the SFReader forums posted by Andre L. West which inspired me to write about potentially fake or scam writing contests.
How can you spot a fake contest?
- They don’t post the previous winners.
Dream Quest One does post its previous winners, and indeed any contest, legitimate or otherwise will be able to post previous winners so long as they’ve been running for a while, so this is not of particular importance, but still the first thing you should check.
- They post previous winning entries, but they are of extremely low quality.
Dream Quest One’s previous 1st place winner is posted here. I’ll let you judge the story’s quality on your own, but since this contest claims (from the SFReader link) to attract 400-500 entries per quarter, it’s surprising that a better written story could not be found.
- The previous winners have no web profile.
This is possible, but is it probable in today’s day and age? None of Dream Quest One’s previous winners has a significant web presence. My own web presence is paltry, but at least I have one. So does nearly every writer I know. This is a clearly a red flag.
- The editor/contest organizer has no web presence other than the contest.
Scammers tend not to want their real names associated with a bogus contest, and so develop only a very thin web alias to take responsibility. A Google search of Andre L West reveals dozens of links having to do with the contest, but almost nothing else. Again, not definitive, but certainly a red flag.
- They charge a fee.
This one is a little more problematic. Legitimate contests also charge fees (with Writers of the Future, with no fee, being the notable exception) . Often these fees are for fundraising purposes and go to support the magazine. I have absolutely no problem with this, and in fact, EDF will be launching its own fee charging contest soon (with all proceeds going to raise our payment rates).
However.
A key thing here is to look at a contest fees vs prize payouts. The top fiction prize at Dream Quest One is $500 (for poetry, it’s an even lower $250), whereas the entry fee is $10 USD. Seems about right, doesn’t it? Except that if they attract, as advertised, 400-500 entries, then they are pulling in $4-5000. For a payout of $1275. Where does the extra 3K go? There’s no magazine or other charitable cause attached to the contest. Mr. West claims it goes to administration, which means the fees for administering the contest are a staggering 75% of gross.
- They pay their judges.
Again, thorny. It’s common for even legitimate contest to offer a stipend (we plan to for the EDF contest). However, you also get big names and advertise the heck out of them. You’re paying them to attach their name to your contest. If they have no name to speak of, what are you paying for? Slush reader is a volunteer position after all.
- The contest doesn’t normally publish fiction.
SFReader has a contest that asks for publication rights when they don’t normally publish fiction. However, SFReader is a huge, thriving site where it’s likely your work will get seen. Same thing for Writers Digest. Dream Quest One appears to exist solely to support the contest. Sure they publish your work there, but who is going to be reading your work? Other contest entrants. Period.
So what is my conclusion regarding whether or not Dream Quest One is a scam writing contest? From the points above, it’s hard to say. There are lots of red flags, but instead of being a scam, it could simply be poorly thought out and incompetently administered. Either way, you won’t see me shelling out money to enter.
15 Comments(+Add)
I personally don’t submit to writing contests that require a fee. It’s a thing of principle for me. I’m a writer, I’m starving, and I see no point paying someone else to tell me whether they want my story or not. If I wanted to do that, I’d just self-publish and avoid the rejection
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Well, to be honest, I do. I plunked down $15 to enter the GlimmerTrain contest the other day. As my Writers of the Future win shows, real people DO win these things. I also placed in the Vancouver Courier contest a few years ago and plan to enter it again this year ($15 fee).
I don’t enter if I don’t think I stand a chance of winning. Odds are often no worse than the regular submission system in most cases, and sometimes better because of people who exclude themselves from entering contests.
However, I usually look at the venue and think, is this a place I’d like to support? Only if the answer is “yes”, AND I think I can win, do I enter.
I enter WOTF, but it’s free, and legit. I just would rather enter a free contest and save that $15 for something more useful…like a really good Italian.
Besides, WOTF is the only one I think I can win
. Glimmer Train and all them tend to take stuff that I don’t write, so I don’t bother.
Yeah, the GlimmerTrain piece I sent was speculative, but as literary as I can write, and the speculative element is disguised, so we’ll see.
They ARE starting to take more speculative, but mostly stuff that ursula leguin and margaret atwood write. Someday I hope to be that good. But not right now.
for me, the web design for the dream quest one is a big red flag in and of itself.
for certain print journals, if you pay a contest fee they’ll give you a year’s subscription or at least one issue of the magazine, which is usually about the same cost. sure, they want to raise their subscription numbers for advertisers, but as a writer you are still at least getting something out of the deal besides a rejection … or acceptance and big cash prize, if you’re lucky.
I’ve seen the print journal contest / subscriber thing before, and I’ve seen writers cry foul in those contests too. They complain that magazines shouldn’t be going after writers as a subscriber base, but in reality writers are the only ones who read those magazines anyways.
I think writers who never, under any circumstances, enter fee contests are doing themselves and the field a disservice.
One should be >careful< which fee contests one enters, and also be comfortable looking at one’s fee as a contribution to that venue’s success.
I have mixed emotions about pay contests. I entered BrainHarvest’s recent contest, but I did it with the alterior motive of jumpstarting my stalled writing.
I agree that a contest should usually support a magazine (or v/v), especially if it has an entry fee. I’ll check out some of these links, though. I’m one curious cat.
I don’t see it as a disservice, I just don’t particularly want to pay money on top of already spending money to send my submission in (some of the big contests don’t take e-subs). I’m a writer of the Harlan Ellison vein. I write for myself and I don’t for free or to pay someone else to read my work. It works the other way around, in my opinion. You pay the writer; the writer doesn’t pay you.
But maybe I’m old-fashioned in thinking that writers today have lost a lot of what made them potent figures in the past. People expect it for free, now, and the result is that writers get paid less today than they did in the early days of genre fiction. There’s nothing right about that at all.
I’m not sure that being part of a vein characterized by a writer whose peak was twenty or forty years ago is necessarily prudent.
Personally, I’m in the Scalzi camp: “The greatest threat to the modern writer is obscurity”.
Honestly that “You pay the writer; the writer doesn’t pay you” is like any other writing rule. It should be unbreakable for the beginning writer, but once you get to a certain point, rigid adherence to it begins to hurt you.
For instance, do you think it’s a dumb idea to use a part of your advance to pay a publicist to advertise your book? Of course not. Why, then, would you not write a flash piece (net investment time: 2 hours) to get your name in front of 4000 people? Sure EDF pays you, but if I were in that situation, and I had something like a book to sell, I’d write a piece just for the exposure.
Harlan Ellison is hardly obscure. He just wants to eat. And the guy is still active as a writer. He works on screenplays and a lot of other stuff quite regularly, but all that is “behind the scenes” stuff.
That said, I get the obscurity argument, but I’m not in a position where I’m desperate enough to spend $15 in fees to get published or whatever. I have a job (I teach and am a grad student); so there’s nothing in it for me, as a writer, to submit work that will cost me. Exposure, yes, but if I am going to pay someone for something, I might as well save all that money I’ll waste on contests and put it towards a publicist…
And WOTF is free; it pays quite handsomely to the winners too. Why would I send my work to any other contests that don’t pay significantly more, but require me to pay them?
As for your analogy: No, that would be perfectly acceptable. The difference is that hiring a publicist isn’t the same as writing the book. If I got an advance, then I got paid for my book. My job at that point is to sell my book and to write other ones.
I’m with Ellison: too many writers are willing to settle for nothing or, hell, less than nothing, just because we think that’s the way it should be. The problem is that it creates problems for those who have proven themselves quite adept at the writing game, who don’t work for free or for a negative (unless there’s a darn good reason). It also creates problems for emerging writers who do have talent, because they find themselves in particularly lowly positions that we’ve allowed to be created (even in publishing this is true, and Scalzi has touched on this in regards to the whole internship thing).
I see no problem sending a flash fiction piece to EDF. They pay you. Not much, but they pay you. But I don’t have to pay EDF to read my story to decide if they want to pay me for it. I just submit (except in the case of your contest, which you said has a fee).
I get the arguments, I just don’t find them particularly compelling and more or less abusive of authors in general (or writers, if you want to play a game of semantics).
But I’m old fashioned. That’s my problem, I suppose. That’s not to say I haven’t given things out for free, just that when my intentions are to publish something, I want to be paid for it, not the other way around. The least I deserve for writing a publishable story is a free cheeseburger…I don’t think that’s asking for much.
You raise some valid points, but I still disagree with you. I’d like to write a new post about this (that’ll probably hit the blog on Friday). Hopefully I can tackle some of that grey area between us.
Sure thing. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t dislike you or EDF or anything like that. I just have strong opinions on the subject of fees
. I have strong opinions about print subs too. I only sub to WOTF because I like it (and because I have 2 honorable mentions) and have one piece in to F&SF because I was already going to the post office and figured, why not? Generally I don’t sub to places that don’t take e-subs, though. There’s no logical reason not to take e-subs these days 
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Hey, absolutely not. I’ve disagreed with you on your blog, you’re certainly allowed, even encouraged to do so here.
It’s nice to have a good ole’ fashioned debate now and then.
For me the goal is to get published in a desirable magazine.
To pay money for the small chance that if published I will also get some cash makes no sense.
Hi John. My new blog is over here: http://www.jordanellinger.com.
However, I’d just like to point out that winning a competition in a magazine’s contest > being published in that magazine.