BUFFY: How do you get to be renowned? I mean, like, do you have to be ‘nowned’ first?
WILLOW: Yes, first there’s the painful ‘nowning’ process.(Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode 4.1 “The Freshman”)
Clever wording aside, the process of gaining renown is, often, a painful one. Yet, renown, or reputation, or recognition, or whatever you want to call it, is important to a writer’s career.
It’s rarely enough that your book stands out from the crowd; you have to stand out from the crowd, too. Name recognition is important when you’re trying to sell your product or your service. It’s important when you’re trying to sell your book to a publisher and then ultimately to the end reader.
It’s not enough to sit back and expect your publisher to sell you and make you a star. All else being equal, a publisher will select the author who already has that star power on their own. They’ll pick someone who knows notable authors who might provide blurbs for the book. They’ll pick award-winners, or authors who have been published in notable places, or whose podcasts attract tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers. You need contacts, credentials… you need renown. And you need to build that renown for yourself. Other people may be able to provide you with some of the opportunities, but no one else can do the legwork for you.
Over time, this blog will dip into several ways to build renown. For today, I’m going to focus on one.
“Award-winning author…” is a great thing to have in front of your name. “New York Times Bestselling…” is even better, “award-nominated” is a good place to start, but “award-winning” carries a nice amount of weight.
There are two ways to win awards. One is to sit back and wait for attention to come to you (the writing equivalent of being spotted by a talent scout or a recruiter). This can happen. It’s not very likely, and it’s not something you should count on. There is no award fairy to fly in your window and exchange the manuscript under your pillow for a trophy and a big check.
The actual process of winning awards is a more painful one, but considering that it’s a part of the painful nowning process, a little discomfort is certainly to be expected.
Submit your writing to contests.
There are a lot of scam contests out there. However, there are a lot of contests that aren’t scams, too.
Writer Beware has a great section on literary contests and how to tell the real ones from the scams. Preditors and Editors has an extensive list of writing contests, annotated with recommendations and warnings.
Poetry is also an option, if you don’t want to take your prose fiction off the market. About.Com links to an extensive collection of poetry contests (some of these contests sport multiple categories: they may other fiction and nonfiction writing categories in addition to poetry. Potentially worth a glance even for non-poets), a few essays about the reliability of contests, and their benefits and risks. Additionally, Absolute Write’s excellent advice on spotting poetry contest scams can be broadened to general literary contests.
Writers are often wary of even the most legitimate of contests, and with good reason:
Many contests have stipulations about simultaneous submissions and published works. You may end up taking your publishable work off the market if you submit it to a contest, losing time that you could be spending submitting to publishers. Additionally, there are very few contests out there that are notable and reputable enough to add to your renown. A publisher will not be impressed if you’ve won a spot in a zine they’ve never heard of.
And many contests charge an entry fee. These fees are used to reimburse the judges for their time, and to fund the prize pool, so many legitimate contests do have entry fees. Preditors and Editors advises against entering contests with entry fees, especially if the prize isn’t significantly more than the fee. It’s a fair recommendation—multiple submissions can add up quickly to a considerable expense that the new writer might not be able to justify or afford—but I would personally be more wary of a contest that didn’t have an entry fee.
The expenses inherent in a contest will have to be paid sooner or later, and I would be wary of the “later” (for example, will the publisher expect you to pay to have your submission published once you’ve won?) if I wasn’t asked for a small fee up front. Always, always read the entry rules and the fine print. If something seems fishy, ask. If the reward is publication of a book, make sure it’s with a reputable press, and that you won’t be expected to cover the costs.
All that being said, finding a small but reputable literary contest with renown of its own—literary journals run by university presses, or by publishers you’ve heard of, are often a safer bet—can be worth the expense. Winning a substantial prize may well make up for the initial entry fee investment, it might get your work in front of influential authors, depending on who the judges are, and the distribution you may receive through publication in a journal with a wide readership may be worth having withheld your work from traditional publication streams.
There are no easy answers, but it’s an option to be aware of. Ultimately, it’s up to you. Winning a writing contest, all by itself, will not be the springboard that launches your sudden success. Entering contests can be good practice. It can inspire you to write toward a deadline. And it can even, if you’re fortunate and if you’re careful to submit to reputable and noteworthy contests, lead to a little bit of money and a little bit of renown.
