Free Online ‘Contests’

Are you looking for a way to get some feedback and maybe even get noticed?

Well, lucky for us, it is the Internet Age, baby. Yeah!

Here are three things that have come under my nose lately that might interest you:

The Knight Agency is having a ‘Book in a Nutshell’ contest. What you do is find out what they represent and then submit your pitch to them if you have a project that fits their interests. What’s a pitch? Basically, sell your story using a maximum of 150 words  limit  and 3 sentences to make these primo agents sit up and select your story from the undoubtedly thigh high pile of submissions they will be receiving. They are only choosing 20 pitches for which they will be provide feedback. Agent feedback on your writing! That’s golden! You have until April 20th.

Along the same lines (okay not really) is agent Nathan Bransford’s ‘Be An Agent for a Day’ contest. Basically, a bunch of people–probably at least a thousand knowing the pull Nathan’s blog generally has from his readers–send Nathan their queries. He then selects 50 queries which he will post on his blog (April 13th). Now here’s where we come in, over the period of a week, we comment on the posted queries. We can also ‘make requests’ (up to 5) for the queries we like. So what’s the catch? He’s going to slip in queries from published books. Ha! If you pick the ‘real’ winners (the queries that lead to a story being published) you win! That easy. I think it’ll be a great way for those who complain about agents to get a real taste of what it is like in their shoes.

And last, but equally exciting is another ‘Secret Agent Contest: Are You Hooked’ sponsored by Authoress aka Miss Snark’s First Victim. I have looked in on some of the contests she’s had in the past and they’ve been great. This time she is looking for the first 250 words of a completed novel falling under the genre of women’s fiction, commercial or literary middle grade/young adult. She opens the submissions on Monday the 13th and only takes the first 50. The feedback is great–from readers as well as a ‘secret’ agent. Again, another fantastic chance to improve your writing.

So go forth and enter my friends!

Enjoy and good luck.