Short Story Contests: How to Find Them, Vet Them, and Enter Well

A Note on What This Article Does and Doesn't Do

This is not a list of contests with deadlines and fees. Those change every single cycle, and a page that quotes them goes out of date within months — at which point it's actively harmful, because you plan around a number that has moved.

What follows is the durable part: where to find the current listings, how to tell a real competition from a profiteering one, and how to enter well. Every figure quoted below is sourced and links to the organiser's own page, which is the only place worth trusting for the current cycle.

Where to Find Contests That Are Actually Real

Start with curated databases rather than a search engine. Anyone can put up a contest page; these lists apply editorial judgement first.

A useful habit: when a contest you've never heard of appears in a Facebook ad or an unsolicited email, check whether it appears in the Poets & Writers database. Absence isn't proof of anything on its own — but combined with anything in the next section, it should stop you.

What a well-run competition looks like

Two worked examples, so you know what "normal" reads like. Both sets of figures were correct at the time of writing and will change — check the organiser's page.

• The Bridport Prize (short story category): open to writers of any nationality writing in English, aged 16 and over at the closing date. Stories up to 5,000 words. Prizes at the last published cycle: £5,000 first, £1,000 second, £500 third, plus ten highly commended at £100. Entries must be unpublished — including on a blog or online forum. Shortlisted writers are read by a literary agency. (official terms)
• Commonwealth Short Story Prize: open to Commonwealth citizens aged 18 and over, stories between 2,000 and 5,000 words, regional winners £2,500 and the overall winner £5,000, with £750 to translators of winning stories. The entry window has recently run 1 September to 1 November annually. (official page)

Notice what both have in common: named eligibility, a stated word limit, published prize amounts, an archive of past winners, and rules you can read before paying anything.

Red Flags: How to Spot a Profiteering Contest

Writer Beware, run by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, tracks this category specifically. Its guidance is the clearest available, and these are the signals it names:

1. Unsolicited approach. An out-of-the-blue email or a social ad urging you to enter should always be treated with caution. Legitimate competitions rarely chase individual writers.
2. A high entry fee. Profiteers charge $60, $75, $100 or more. Writer Beware's own threshold: if more than four of these flags are present — especially if the fee is above $50 — think very carefully before entering.
3. Rights language that takes more than it should. Some contests require you to grant publication rights simply by entering, and never release them. In the worst cases your entry becomes the property of the contest owner, meaning you may have signed away your right to publish your own story.
4. Missing or vague rules. Bad rules are a warning. No rules at all is, in Writer Beware's phrasing, a klaxon-blaring run-away-now sign.
5. Pay-to-be-published. Never pay to have your entry included in an anthology. In book publishing, money flows towards the writer.

Two more worth adding from the same body of guidance: no archive of past winners (a real contest is proud of them), and no named judge or judging process.

Sources: Writer Beware — Contests and Awards and Awards Profiteers.

Read the Rights Clause Before You Pay

This is the single most-skipped step, and the one that can cost you a story permanently. Before entering, find the rights paragraph and answer three questions:

1. What rights am I granting, and when? Entering should grant nothing. Rights should transfer only if you win — typically first publication rights, sometimes with a short exclusivity window.
2. Do they come back to me? First publication rights should revert after publication or after a stated period. If the terms never release them, you cannot republish your own story in a collection later.
3. What counts as "previously published"? This bites people constantly. Many competitions — Bridport among them — count a post on your own blog, or in an online writing forum, as published. Posting a draft for feedback can disqualify it. If you want to enter a story, keep it off the public internet.

If the rights paragraph is missing, or you can't understand it after two readings, that's an answer in itself.

Choosing Which to Enter

Entry fees add up, so treat this as a small budget with an allocation rather than a lottery ticket you buy whenever one appears.

• Match the form, not just the genre. A 2,500-word limit is a genuinely different piece of writing from a 5,000-word one. Don't hack a story down to fit; enter the competition your story is already the right shape for.
• Read the previous winners. Almost every reputable contest publishes an archive. Twenty minutes there tells you more about a judge's taste than any amount of guessing.
• Prefer free and low-fee entries while you're starting. The Commonwealth prize is free. Plenty of magazine-run competitions sit under £10. Save the higher fees for stories you genuinely believe in.
• Check the eligibility line first. Nationality, age and residency requirements are common, and they are absolute. Reading it first saves you the entry fee.
• Ignore the odds. Every open competition attracts thousands of entries. That's an argument for entering the right ones with your best work, not for entering none.

A Submission Routine That Survives a Year

The writers who place in competitions are, overwhelmingly, the ones who keep a system. It doesn't need to be complicated.

SUBMISSION TRACKER (one row per entry)

STORY            | word count | status: draft / ready / out / placed
CONTEST          |
URL of rules     |
FEE              |
WORD LIMIT       |
DEADLINE         |   (from the organiser's page, checked on: ____ )
SIMULTANEOUS OK? | Y / N
RIGHTS ON ENTRY  | none / publication / transfer   <- if "transfer", don't
RIGHTS IF WIN    |
DATE SENT        |
RESULT DATE      |   (from their page — most publish one)
OUTCOME          |

Four habits that make it work:

1. Check the deadline on the organiser's page on the day you enter. Never trust a third-party listing, including this one.
2. Track simultaneous submissions. Many contests forbid entering a story that's under consideration elsewhere. Breaking that rule, even accidentally, gets you disqualified and remembered.
3. Diarise the result date, then forget about it. Judging routinely takes months. Waiting actively is corrosive; write the next thing.
4. Log the rejection and re-enter it somewhere. A story that didn't place is not a bad story — it's a story that met one judge on one day. Send it out again the same week.

Make the Story Worth Entering First

No amount of submission strategy compensates for a story that isn't ready. Competition readers are reading hundreds of entries, and the first page decides most of them.

• The form itself has rules of compression that differ from the novel — How to Write a Short Story covers what a short story has to do differently.
• The opening does a disproportionate amount of the work: Crafting Compelling Opening Lines.
• If you need a story to enter, Story Ideas: How to Generate Them includes forty prompts and a section specifically on short fiction.
• Before you send it, do the pass everyone skips: Self-Editing Tips.

One last piece of practical advice. Most competitions receive a large number of technically competent, entirely forgettable stories. The ones that get through tend to take a real risk somewhere — in structure, in voice, or in what they're willing to say. Polish is the entry ticket, not the thing that wins.