Competitive advantage

The smaller the pond, the more vicious the pond-life. Perhaps not for frogs and dragonflies, but certainly for food writers, poets and short-story writers. It’s hard to get published, next to impossible to make any money and your fellow writers all hate you. Who would bother?

Plenty of people. Weird but true. A publisher at one of the big multinationals once told me that in five years his firm had received 12,500 unsolicited manuscripts – 10 a day, 50 a week, 2500 a year – and had published precisely one of these. For some years now my colleague Graeme Lay and I have run short-short story (maximum 500 words) competitions looking for 100 publishable stories and usually get way more than 1000 entries. It’s Euclid’s missing axiom: more people write poetry than read it.

The rewards are derisory. Some literary magazines will accept your poem or story only if you are a subscriber. Even then you may not get paid, or at least not in cash. Maybe you’ll get a free copy of the magazine.

Most competitions charge an entry fee to cover the prize money, judge’s fees and various incidental expenses, such as paying people to read all the entries and make a selection to go to the celebrity judge ($5 per short story is standard). That’s entirely fair and proper where there isn’t a big sponsor involved. But occasionally things go wrong.

When I was convenor of the NZ Society of Authors legal/contractual advisory committee I got involved in a case where the organiser of a competition announced that there would be no first prize, just second and third, as the judge thought that none of the entries warranted first prize. If the second place-getter was better than the rest of the field, why was it not declared first place-getter? What happened to the missing prize money? I never found out, though I did get a lot of abuse from the organiser for having the temerity to enquire.

So it can be a snake pit. But New Zealand competitions are run fairly and any that aren’t are the result of incompetence rather than dishonesty. Not so overseas. Who knows what happens in Milan or Novosibirsk, but in the US it appears that at least one poetry competition has been decided not only on the basis of who you know, which is traditional, but on who you sleep with.

Foetry describes a system riddled with fraud and sycophancy in which anonymous judges award prizes to their students, friends and lovers. In one contest in 1999 sponsored by the University of Georgia Press, the prize went to a poet who was in a relationship with one of the judges; the couple married a few months later.

That would never happen in our pond.