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How do you earn a reliable and profitable income from writing awards? It all depends on your approach. Here are several tips distilled from the experience of countless veteran contest winners.
Study your market first. Don't do a story then look for a competition. The professional way is to see what the market wants then shape a product for it.
So you'd choose a list of, say, a dozen good contests with a large total prize sum. Then you would adapt a story just for those major contests.
If possible, look at the stories that won those contests before. If the organizers don't publish them, ask why. Do the stories exist? Did the organizers even pay out the prize money?
Your scepticism may be out of place with a reputable contest that's been around a while. But many obscure contests are run just to make money and they may well be a fraud.
Look at a story you've written before. Maybe it's just a draft. Now tidy it up exclusively for that contest. So if the contest demands you start with a sentence 'If only I had known then what I know now...' it's not difficult to take a story that already exists and shape your pre-written narrative entirely around it.
Be original in your adaptation. If the contest demands that entries be on some foreign holiday theme, the obvious idea is to locate your story in some exotic tourist location. But every other contestant will be doing that. Find a new angle: 'The wonderful holiday I almost went on, and why I'm glad I didn't'.
If you write a brand new story for that contest, write it so you can adapt it and enter it in a lot of other contests later or even simultaneously. How? By adapting it to the various themes, lengths and other demands of each contest.
The biggest reason that entries fail, apart from poor writing, is that they don't match the story precisely to the brief. If the contest demands 1500 words on a specific topic, don't submit 2500 words and on a different theme entirely!
That might sound obvious but every contest judge will confirm that countless contestants do exactly that.
There's usually no problem in submitting the same essential story to several contests provided you adapt the story significantly to each contest. But study the contest rules. Many lazy writers don't read thesmall print and it's the reason why they fail.
Look on each contest story as a product that you make to win money. Of course, you can still have pleasure from creating it but your writing is no longer a hobby. It's a serious new source of income.
So don't get emotionally attached to a story. It may succeed or flop for many reasons beyond your control. When you can assume that attitude, you'll have become a professional contest entrant. And that's a win-win profit engine!
