One of the reasons I’m excited to finish my MFA and return to having a job is that even “wins” in the literary world sometimes feel like scams. (We also have lots of obvious scams, like the dude with a handful of publications who runs a company charging $200 to “lightly edit” [run spellcheck, I’m guessing] and submit your fiction to ten literary journals that mostly don’t pay contributors.) Manuscript contests are one of these gray areas for me: they’re widely accepted, especially among poets, are often so poorly run that presses don’t even notify submitters they’ve lost, and offer to their winners the minor reward of $1000 and a book that is sometimes/often only available for purchase on the website of an obscure academic press. (The award should more fairly be noted as $970 to $975, since even winners had to pay the entry fee.)
If I sound embittered and you’re thinking it’s because I’ve lost a lot of manuscript contests in the past year, you’re not wrong! In some ways, it’s been good for me to enter manuscript contests. I unsuccessfully shopped my story collection to agents, and got enough helpful feedback that I revised the collection and sent it off to 19 (holy shit) manuscript contests I had carefully selected based on how much I liked their book covers. My real hope (why?) was to win a fourth-year fellowship at Ohio State that usually only goes to creative writing MFAs if they’ve got a book under contract. The real award of winning a contest, then, was not the $1000 award but the $36,000 fellowship that might follow only its tail; only it turned out that I wasn’t eligible for the fellowship since I already had won two fellowship years, thus embittering the entire competition process. That doubled goal, though, is the only way I can really understand the persistence of manuscript contests. Academics need to publish books to remain academics; so for the writers of unmarketable poetry and story collections who are trying to get the last tenure track job in the nation, it’s worth it to spend hundreds of dollars on contest fees.
For the rest of us, though? I’m not sure these contests are a sign of a healthy literary ecosystem. This isn’t to say I didn’t get some good out of entering them. My collection was shortlisted at four contests, which was a great confirmation that I’d made the right edits to the manuscript. I now know I may have a good but unsellable story collection (see again: no publisher wants story collections). All my contest fees are now supporting, minorly, the work of these small presses, which is probably the healthiest way to think of contest fees; though some sadly ran their contests so badly that I no longer want to support their work in the normal way, by buying their books. Which…seems like the problem with book contests as a whole? It’s the same issue that plagues literary journals as well, where the funding comes from readers, grants, university systems, but also from fees writers pay to submit. These fees often seem fair to me: as someone who’s read and edited for journals with free submissions, I know that most people don’t read any of the journals they submit to. A few bucks to slow the firehose of submissions seems, in that light, not unreasonable, though certain journals take advantage by accepting unsolicited submissions at $3 a pop, which languish for one to nine years in their slush pile while they solicit 90% of the fiction they actually publish. (I don’t think anyone really makes out well in this system except for Submittable, who rake in a percentage of the fees for every submission that goes through their glitchy but generally efficient portal.)
Unlike short story submissions, though, which are usually booted back to the author with a “Thank you for submitting but not the right fit, good luck elsewhere, definitely don’t submit to us again too soon”, manuscript rejections (when they come) almost always include an encouragement to submit again next year. This landscape, in which writers are encouraged to retain our delusions long enough to shell out another $25 for a contest in which we didn’t come close the prior year, does not strike me as a lasting, healthy system; but what comes in its place when so few readers are interested in story collections and major publishers will only take them when they’re slipped into a two-book deal (the dream!)? Manuscript contests are one of those pieces of the literary world that I place in my “definitively not a scam” category, but when I try to explain them to non-writers they look so baffled that I start to wonder if what I’m describing is, in fact, a scam. Not one perpetrated by any individual press (I think publishers generally are good people with good intentions) but by the unbalanced number of people who want to write story collections vs. people who want to read them, which has resulted in this system in which the only people paying for story collections are the same writers who wrote them. (Help us!!!)