When Karen Brown entered her first writing contest in 1995, she didn’t win. She didn’t win the second one either. Or the third. But the Tampa-based fiction writer refused to let these setbacks stop her. She continued to submit her stories to literary magazines and had many of them accepted in journals such as the Georgia Review and StoryQuarterly. At one point, she even landed an agent, who briefly shopped her work around to publishing houses before abandoning her to return to a career in editing. All the while Brown kept submitting—and paying entry fees—to writing contests around the country, always shifting the stories around in her manuscript, putting new ones in, taking old ones out, trying to find that magic combination that would win over the judges.

Finally, in 2006 Brown’s debut story collection, Pins and Needles, won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, which included publication of her book the following year by the University of Massachusetts Press. The cash award of $4,000 wasn’t life altering, and she readily admits that Pins and Needles didn’t sell that many copies or get many reviews, but she did have a book out and could proudly introduce herself as the winner of the Grace Paley Prize. On a more practical level, Brown, who finished her PhD in English in 2008, credits the prize with helping her get a full-time job in 2010 teaching writing and literature at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

She continued to write stories, but without a marketable novel to entice publishers, she couldn’t find a home for them in book form. So she went back to the method that had worked the first time around and, after five more years, she won the 2011 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, for her second story collection, Little Sinners and Other Stories, to be published by the University of Nebraska Press this fall.

In the small world of literary fiction, Karen Brown is unquestionably a success story. She is the author of two books of stories published by reputable university presses, has a full-time teaching position, and, having finally secured an agent again, she is at work on a novel. Yet at each step along the way, she has had to pay publishers, in the form of contest entry fees, for the privilege of having her manuscripts considered for publication. “I wouldn’t even be able to tally how much money I’ve spent on contests,” she says. “I’ve sent [my work] to each of these contests many, many times.”

During the past decade or so, as commercial publishers have been snapped up by large corporations, resulting in publishers having to deliver higher profit margins than collections of poetry and literary short fiction can produce, Brown’s experience has become increasingly common. According to an analysis of Poets & Writers Magazine’s Grants & Awards section, the number of prizes offering the publication of a book of poetry or fiction has risen more than 50 percent over the past ten years, from 78 in 2001 to 118 in 2011. During the same period, the number of prizes offering the publication of a story collection, such as those won by Brown, has more than doubled, from ten in 2001 to twenty-one in 2011. (This magazine’s Grants & Awards section is an editorially vetted listing of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction prizes that offer $1,000 or more, prizes that offer less than $1,000 but charge no entry fee, and those that offer prestigious nonmonetary awards.)

This proliferation of writing contests arises from a simple economic reality: In an age when commercial publishers push a relatively small number of blockbuster books to meet their bottom lines, the hundreds of talented writers pouring out of MFA programs every year are necessarily steering toward small, university, and independent presses to get their work in front of readers. But how do those presses commit to publishing books of poetry and literary prose without the promise of a healthy return on their investment?

They run contests, that’s how. Take away the trappings of celebrity judges and awards ceremonies, and a well-run writing contest that ends in the publication of a book is really a kind of communal subsidy press. Because everyone understands that, realistically, there aren’t enough readers out there to support the publication of books of poetry and short fiction by unknown writers, all the unknown writers chip in a few bucks to help the publisher bring out the best book submitted for each contest.

Organizers of writing contests are, perhaps not surprisingly, wary of publicizing details of their contest budgets, but the organizers of three contest programs—the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, sponsored by the nonprofit literary press Sarabande Books; the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, sponsored by the nonprofit Cave Canem Foundation; and the Prairie Schooner Book Prizes in Poetry and Fiction, sponsored by the University of Nebraska Press—offered to share the budgets of their 2011 contests.

Last year, according to figures supplied by series editor Kwame Dawes, the Prairie Schooner Book Prizes in Poetry and Fiction drew submissions from 901 writers, each of whom paid a twenty-five-dollar entry fee, for a total of $22,525. Out of that, the organization had to cover $2,500 of each $3,000 prize (the remaining $500 for each prize came out of the university press’s budget) and pay four judges $1,000 each and twenty first readers $200 each; it also incurred a long list of other administrative and promotion costs. Add it all up (see table 1 [3]) and the total expenses are $50,700, or more than double the earnings from the entry fees. Because Prairie Schooner contracts out the publication of the winning books to the University of Nebraska Press, it doesn’t pay to produce or distribute the actual books, nor does it earn any profit that may come from selling them. “Clearly we rely on the support of our donors to sustain the prize,” Dawes says. “This is obviously not a moneymaking venture.”

The Cave Canem Poetry Prize, which is open only to African American poets, charges a slightly lower entry fee, and also contracts out the publication of the winning book, to one of three participating presses. Last year, according to Alison Meyers, Cave Canem’s executive director, the prize drew eighty entries, which at fifteen dollars each earned the organization a total of twelve hundred dollars, a little more than 16 percent of the cost of running the prize (see table 2 [4]). The shortfall, an estimated $8,883, had to be made up through individual donations and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and other foundations, according to Meyers.

Unlike Prairie Schooner and Cave Canem, Sarabande Books publishes its winners itself. According to figures provided by editor in chief Sarah Gorham (see table 3 [4]), Sarabande received a total of 1,252 manuscripts for its 2011 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction. The entry fee for both prizes last year was twenty-five dollars (it has since been raised to twenty-seven dollars), which, after no-fee coupons from last year’s finalists are deducted, netted the independent publisher a combined $31,175. When you add the roughly $13,000 Sarabande typically brings in from its prizewinning books each year, the press counted on $44,226 in income from its 2011 contests. This figure falls just short of the $44,650 the press spent running the two contests and publishing the winning books. “A book has to go into a second or third printing before we start to make money,” Gorham explains.

What is clear from the budgets, all three of which account for ancillary expenses such as staff and office space in different ways, is that entry fees are the foundation upon which such contests are built. Most fees tend to range from fifteen to thirty dollars, with slightly higher figures for contests that invite longer manuscripts such as novels. “I think in this day and age, if you have a manuscript, you can muster the fifteen dollars,” says Meyers of Cave Canem’s entry fee. “It’s kind of a reality check. We’re in this together.”

This notion of a partnership between publisher and author, symbolized by the entry fee, neatly sums up the view of many contest organizers, who see themselves as editors who value the work of writers that mainstream publishing houses cannot afford to take on. For the organizers, who are often working with limited marketing budgets and can’t promise writers print runs as large as commercial presses might, contests, with their cash awards and prestigious titles, offer a way to attract writers who might not otherwise be as excited about submitting to a university or independent press.

But more than anything, organizers say, contests offer small, independent, and university presses the financial wherewithal to publish books that major New York publishers won’t take a chance on. “If independent [presses] didn’t publish these works of art, who would?” asks Gorham, whose fourth poetry collection, Bad Daughter, was published last year by Four Way Books.

“We think of it as not simply recognizing excellence, which it is,” adds Meyers, “but also fitting in with our mission.”

But what about writers who are being asked to pay to have their work considered? Is it a good deal for them?

Obviously, it is not a good deal for writers if the contest is rigged in favor of a friend or former student of a judge, or if the contest ends up awarding no prizes, as happened in a number of highly publicized cases in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of them documented by the now-defunct website Foetry and reported in this magazine’s column The Contester. Since Foetry closed down in 2007, much of the brouhaha over contest scandals has died out, due also to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) instituting the Contest Code of Ethics, which puts forth three criteria—the “intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process”—as the foundation of an ethical contest.

“The best thing a writer can do,” says Jeffrey Lependorf, CLMP’s executive director, “and the easiest thing to do as well, is look at the press and ask, ‘Is this a press within whose catalogue I would want be included?’ and, if there’s a named judge, ‘Is this a writer I respect?’ If a press states that it abides by the CLMP Contest Code of Ethics, and it is also listed in the pages of Poets & Writers, I think a writer should be quite comfortable in trusting that he or she will be entering a legitimate contest.”

But even if one assumes that most writing contests are fair, writers rarely win until after they have submitted to multiple contests, often over a period of years, meaning that, in many cases, winners have already spent a sizable fraction of their prize in entry fees. Iain Haley Pollock, who won $1,000 in the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize competition for Spit Back a Boy (University of Georgia Press, 2011), estimates he spent between $250 and $300 on prize fees before he won. In fact, he laughs when he recalls that when Meyers called him to tell him he had won, his first thought was, “Thank God, this saves me a couple of hundred dollars” in entry fees for other contests.

But of course Cave Canem didn’t simply hand Pollock a check for $1,000; the organization found him a reputable university publisher and bestowed the credibility of past Cave Canem winners, who have included such well-known poets as Natasha Trethewey and Major Jackson, on an unknown like Pollock, who teaches middle school boys at the Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia. “Having those names associated with me has opened doors for me that I think wouldn’t have been opened if I had just published with a publisher on my own,” he says.

For those whose vision of a pleasant workday doesn’t include a classroom full of middle schoolers, winning a contest can be a route to teaching creative writing in a university setting, where jobs are scarce for writers who haven’t published a book. Because contests allow publishers to put out books that might not survive in a true free market, many writers who might not otherwise rise out of the poorly paid adjunct ranks (or might otherwise toil their lives away in a fluorescent-lit
office cubicle) can earn a steady income teaching college students and go on to write the next book.

But as Prairie Schooner’s Dawes points out, contests can be a double-edged sword for emerging writers, especially poets. While a contest often offers a new poet the best shot at publication, he says, winning a prize doesn’t always help the poet publish her next book. “The whole narrative of being an author is, ‘I have a publisher,’” says Dawes, author of numerous books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including most recently Wheels (Peepal Tree, 2011). “Winning a contest doesn’t give you that kind of security.”

This isn’t true in all cases, of course. As Alison Meyers points out, Cave Canem’s publishing partners have often continued to publish the work of its winning poets after their first prizewinning books. For instance, Trethewey, winner of the very first Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 1999, had her winning book, Domestic Work, published by Graywolf Press, which then published her second collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia, in 2002. Only then, after she won prestigious fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2003 and the Rockefeller Foundation in 2004, did she move to a commercial publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which put out her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Native Guard, in 2006.

More often, though, a book prize is a one-off deal, which, as Dawes notes, doesn’t offer much of a leg up when poets have gathered enough work for a second book. “The challenge that they have is they have to enter another contest,” he says. “And I just don’t think that’s a good life, a good writer’s life.” Still, as Dawes acknowledges with a laugh: “It’s worth it because it’s better than not having your book published.”

As Dawes and other contest organizers point out, book prizes do more than simply publish the winner’s book; they confer the prestige of having won a prize, which often comes with the added boost of having been selected by a well-known author who judged the contest. This can put a young poet at the cool kids’ table at a summer writers workshop, but outside the narrow worlds of academia and the writing-conference circuit, does anyone actually care?

Yes and no. Winning a prize “is not a selling point for me in going to a publisher,” says Sarah Burnes, a literary agent with the Gernert Company. “It’s what’s on the page that matters.” Still, a contest award listed in a query letter can make her take a new writer more seriously. “What that says to me is that they’ve done the groundwork of building a literary career,” says Burnes, who represents Shannon Cain, author of The Necessity of Certain Behaviors (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the 2011 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

Book prizes, especially the more prestigious ones, offer other subtle advantages for authors looking to sell a later book. For one thing, a contest judge is often a well-connected author whose judgment can carry weight with the agents and editors with whom the judge works. Also, says Megan Lynch, a senior editor at Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group USA, many younger editors and editorial assistants gunning for a position in the editing ranks keep up with prizes and read some of the winning books, looking for up-and-coming authors whose work might not be known to those higher up the corporate ladder.

In addition, while the general reading public might not keep up with who won last year’s Grace Paley Prize, the people who buy literary fiction and poetry for independent bookstores and the editors who assign reviews for newspapers and online book review sites often do. Book prizes mentioned in an author’s bio, when presented as part of “a string of accomplishments,” Lynch says, can catch the eye of an independent bookseller deciding which books to put in the front window or an editor deciding whether to assign a review of a first novel by an otherwise unknown author. “It can certainly be helpful with all the things we have to do to get the book onto the radar of the people who handle literary fiction,” says Lynch.

So there you are, an unknown writer with a finished book of stories or poems neatly stacked on your desk and a list of writing contests open on your lap. Should you reach for your checkbook and pay the entry fee or hold out for publication by a press that won’t charge a fee for reading your work?

In some ways the answer is easier for poets, whose mainstream publishing options are more limited. Unless your work is showing up in prestigious literary magazines or you have a connection to the editors at a press that publishes poetry, writing contests probably offer the best way to ensure that your work will at least get a fair reading.

For a short story writer in the same position, the question can turn on whether you have a marketable novel in the works. Many publishers will take a risk on a book of stories, even if they suspect they will lose money on it, if the author has written a novel they think will sell. But even if you are working on a novel you think can sell, entering a writing contest remains a relatively low-cost way to get your work read and to potentially build a résumé. Because fewer fiction writers who are already publishing books enter contests, your competition in a contest can be lighter than it would be in a traditional submission process.

Still, whether you are a poet or a fiction writer, the odds against winning any individual contest are steep, and while an entry fee guarantees that somebody will at least look at your work, it doesn’t mean he will do any more than read a few pages. Chances are that even if you, like Karen Brown, have two manuscripts’ worth of publishable stories, you will have to do what she did and enter dozens of contests before you win one, and that can get pricey.

But it is worth keeping in mind what that money is going toward. Money spent on an entry fee for a writing contest isn’t like money spent gambling at a casino, where every dollar you lose enriches the casino. Paying an entry fee for a writing contest is more like paying dues on a community project. For each project, the organizers collect the dues, supplement it with money from their funders and consumers, and use it to finance the project—in this case a book. Maybe that book will be yours; maybe it will be somebody else’s. If you don’t care about the project, or if the book only matters to you if it happens to be the one you wrote, then entering contests is probably a bad bet. But this you can be sure of: If you and the other entrants stop anteing up, far fewer of these valuable books will end up being published.

Michael Bourne has published fiction and poetry in numerous journals including, most recently, Potomac Review andOrange Coast Review. He lives in New York City, where he teaches at Fordham University and works as a staff writer for the literary website the Millions.