How To Win A Book Contest – 7 Pitfalls To Avoid

This year’s SPR Awards has thrown up some points that we’d like to share with you to help you avoid the pitfalls when entering your book for a contest. You can take a look at the entrants here.

1. Book Covers

Time and time again we’ve said it, and time and time again, authors don’t listen. If you are selling a book, it needs to have a professional finish. If we are staking a reputation on a book by choosing it as a winner, it must have a well-designed book cover. That probably means not using a beloved drawing or photo.

And please, stop using DIN Condensed and Antonio fonts. Unless you get the right proportions for a cover (that a book cover designer knows by eye), any font will look unprofessional.

2. Writing issues

Weather

For some reason, an overwhelming amount of books this year started with weather reports, mostly rain hitting roads, roofs, windows, or oceans. Some writers start every single chapter with a weather report.  While a well-placed storm or breeze may add something to the setting, this amount of weather comes across as a cheap trick to lay some ground. Try to set the scene with other descriptions instead.

Full names and waking up

Books starting with someone’s full name is a bugbear. “Henry Charles Albert David Duke of Sussex rubbed his eyes and blinked.” A lot of opening of eyes too. Too many wakings up, too many eyes rubbed.

Also, brand names. OK, it’s a thing in thrillers, but some authors strangle themselves using brand names to a fault. We need to know what the objects are before you start name-dropping. “I pick up my Sauconys, throw on my North Face, ran for my R18 drinking my Innocent…” Get the idea?

“Had had”

Avoid using past-past tense in the character’s head. It makes following what happened in the past of the character’s thoughts, already in the past, really complicated, and some authors failed to follow it themselves, darting back into the present-past. Confused? There are four different past tenses in English, and you need to know exactly which one to use. Past Simple, Past Continuous, Past Perfect and Past Perfect Continuous. Using them willy-nilly hurts an editor’s bones. Please don’t.

Ramblings and repetitions

While we all want a little bit of thinking from characters, we don’t need full shopping lists, menus being ordered from, what is being cooked, how much sugar is going in the tea, the ironing of clothing, the folding of sheets, the make-up being added, in so much detail that the character ends up sounding like they have an obsessive disorder. We also don’t want the full armory described, or what’s in a bag, or what someone is wearing head to toe.

Tech speak, whether it be in Space, the Dark Ages, or in a computer lab, should be kept to a minimum. We really don’t need the ins and outs unless they move the plot along.

We don’t need to keep hearing about Lady so-and-so’s emerald eyes glittering, or the raven hair shimmering more than once. Keep these details to a minimum.

So much dialogue

The rule is to use dialogue only when it would be weird not to. And yet, a vast majority of books entered use dialogue instead of action and description for pages and pages. If you have used more than three lines of dialogue in a scene, you probably aren’t writing the story efficiently.

3. Poor editing

Glaring editing issues such as entirely missing words, even on the first page, will not do well in a contest. Nor will books that have clearly not been edited for plot arc or content issues. So many books have not had any structural editing, and they end up either waffling on or completely dumbfounding the reader because the story doesn’t flow well.

4. Just not ready

Some books are clearly not ready in any way, and yet, in spite of the obvious, they are entered to contests to meet a deadline. These will not be picked as winners. We need to be able to promote you after you win. Some books were entered without editing, without formatting, or without a cover, and were not even on sale yet, which is one of the rules of entry of our contest.

5. Wrong sort of book for a general contest

Entering a very niche business book, a local interest book, or a family biography is unlikely to do well in a book contest. This is because although many contests are open to all types of entries, you cannot expect this kind of book to stand up next to a well-written, colorful book in a commercial field, fiction or non-fiction, that appeals to a broader audience.

Another problem is the types of files submitted. We plainly stated the types of files we would accept, and yet many authors submitted a different type of file that we couldn’t even open. This meant we had to disqualify them. Make sure you have the right file chosen when uploading. Most contests will not accept updates to entries. We do, for the first 24 hours, but that’s not the norm.

6. Not reading the rules

This year we had to disqualify a few books because they did not adhere to the rules, even though the rules were written very clearly on the entry page. Make sure you check with the contest organizers if you are unsure if your book meets the requirements.

This year we had to disqualify a couple of books for not having a Kindle version available on sale, which was one of the main rules. In one case, the book may have won the contest, but as the prize is eBook-centric, we could not award the prize to that author.

7. Unoriginal Story

It’s amazing how many stories we read that are the exact copy of each other. Fantasy, YA Paranormal, and Space Operas are particularly prone to having the exact same plot, characters, and arc. Lately, there seems to be an emphasis on female YA protagonists hunting down crystals or secret objects. Nearly all of them have green eyes and have some kind of magical family member they discover in a scroll or letter. It’s peculiar but true.

The SPR Awards 2019 Winner is announced on April 10, 2020

So, if you are reading this because you didn’t win, maybe you can pinpoint the issue and try with your next book, next year.