FEATURE Entering competitions

  

Maggie Womersley explains why entering writing competitions is a good way to test your book before querying agents. Make 2025 the year you win at entering competition.

 


So, you’ve written a book for kids and deep in your soul, you’re pretty excited about it – maybe you’ve been working on it for years, or perhaps you coughed it out of your subconscious in a forty-eight-hour fever-dream. Either way, you’re thinking about releasing it into the wild – and the sooner the better.

 

Well don’t. At least, not yet.

 

Take a breath, put that covering letter aside, and quell those fantasies about your ‘dream agent’ calling you twenty-four hours after you’ve pressed ‘send’. There is another way to grab an agent’s interest, and it might just be your golden ticket to the top of the slush pile. I am of course talking about the Way of the Writing Competition.

 

“Why would I waste my time and money entering competitions I probably won’t win, when I could just query lots of agents in the usual way, for free right now?” I hear you say. Well, even leaving aside the obvious fact that if you make the shortlist of a major competition, agents are going to take note, there are still lots of perks that come with entering comps, even if you don’t make the final pick. Here are five for starters -

 

  1. Unlike querying an agent, most competitions are anonymous, so, unlike a ‘no’ from an agent, a ‘no’ from a competition doesn’t mean you can’t re-write and re-enter the same book again. In fact, you definitely should.
  2. Unlike agents, a lot of competitions don’t require you to have finished your book to enter. Although be warned – some will require your full manuscript if you make it onto the longlist. But what better incentive to knuckle down and finish, than nabbing a place on the shortlist
  3. Competitions have strict time-lines, so you’ll know by a certain date whether you’ve been successful.
  4.  Some competitions have generously long, longlists, and some will even tell you if you made the Top 100 – thereby boosting your writing confidence and letting you know that your book has real potential.
  5. Competitions often come with ‘take-out’ in the form of online webinars, writing tips, and interviews with judges. Not to mention websites stuffed full of useful content like past winner profiles, general feedback on entries, or just Good News about debut authors like you. Plus, many have lively social media accounts with regular updates about their judging process and results – which is exciting and fun and makes you feel part of a writing community.

 

I’m not saying don’t send your beautiful, fabulous, life-changing book out to agents; I’m just saying why not test it out in a few competitions? And they don’t have to be the big ones with hundreds of entrants – some of the most rewarding comps I’ve entered have been small, regional, genre-specific, or niche in some other way. I once won a year’s worth of free cinema tickets in a competition organised by my local paper – just for writing five hundred words about the best day of my life. I later heard that only seven people entered – was I bothered? No, I had free films for a year, and the knowledge that I’d beaten those other six writers – Ha! I was ecstatic. Our very own Words & Pictures runs a brilliant Slush Pile Comp regularly, where agents and editors offer valuable one-to-one feedback for an entry that best fulfils their specific brief – and in a pool of 30-70 entries, the odds of that winner being you, aren’t too shabby. So, take another look at those opening pages, polish your first line, refresh your synopsis, nail your hook and go again.

 

If you do list in any competitions, take those wins, however medium-sized and amplify them. Start building your writer’s CV around them, promote them via your social media profile, tell your friends and family and bask in their admiration – because you and your book deserve it. And when you do start querying agents with your long-listed, highly commended, runner-up of a book, I can guarantee that agents will be very interested to know that not only do you already take yourself seriously as writer, but other people do too.

 

Here are some popular Writing Competitions for unagented and unpublished writers that you might like to try – some are currently closed but will open later this year. These competitions are not endorsed by Words & Pictures – enter at your own risk! But do tell us here if you get anywhere, so we can celebrate with you.

 

https://www.cheshirenovelprizekids.com

 

https://bathnovelaward.co.uk/childrens-novel-award/

 

https://mslexia.co.uk/competitions/childrens-and-ya-novel/

 

https://write-mentor.com/writementor-2025-writing-awards/

 

https://goldeneggacademy.co.uk/award/

 

https://www.chickenhousebooks.com/submissions/

 

https://discoverkelpies.co.uk/kelpies-prize-writing/

 

https://www.arvon.org/search-for-a-storyteller-with-david-fickling-books/

 

https://www.iaminprint.co.uk/competitions-2024/

 

https://www.faber.co.uk/journal/faber-launches-action-prize/


 
Next time: One Year on from SCBWI’s Undiscovered Voices 2024 competition, Maggie catches up with the 16 finalists and finds out what happened next.

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In 2024 Maggie won The Cheshire Novel Prize for Kids and was a SCBWI Undiscovered Voices finalist. She was also shortlisted for The Times/Chicken House Prize, and longlisted for the MsLexia Kids Novel Prize and the Bath Kids Novel Prize. She also got absolutely nowhere in quite a few other prizes, proving you can’t win ‘em all. She is Deputy Chair of the Committee for Undiscovered Voices 2026 which will launch later this Spring. For more information on how Undiscovered Voices could launch your writing career –visit https://www.undiscoveredvoices.com

 

 

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