Should You Pay to Enter a Writing Contest?
Quick answer: Should you pay to enter a writing contest? Yes when the fee is proportionate and the contest is honest. How to price an entry fee and when to refuse it.
Paying a reasonable entry fee to an honest contest is normal and defensible: fees of three to twenty-five dollars fund prizes, judges and administration, the way race entries fund marathons. Pay when the fee is proportionate to the prize pool, the judges are named, past winners are visible, and the rights clause binds winners only. Refuse when the fee is large relative to the prize, the contest is opaque, or paying is required to see your own result.
The question is really about pricing, not principle. A fee is a purchase, and like any purchase it is worth it or not depending on what is actually being sold and to whom.
Why legitimate contests charge at all
Contest economics are simple and public at the honest end. A competition paying 2,000 dollars across its prizes, compensating a judge, and running administration for a thousand entries needs roughly the revenue a modest fee provides. Grant-funded and magazine-run contests sometimes absorb the cost, which is why excellent free contests exist too; the presence of a fee is not evidence of greed, and the absence of one is not evidence of virtue. What matters is whether the arithmetic visibly adds up to a real cultural operation.
There is also a filtering function nobody loves saying aloud: a small fee thins the field of entirely careless entries, which shortens judging queues and slightly improves a serious entrant's odds. Writers grumble about this and quietly benefit from it. The fee-free famous contests draw fields of many thousands; a five-dollar fee at a comparable contest often halves that.
Pricing an entry like a purchase
Put numbers on it. Expected prize value: prize pool divided by a realistic field size, honestly, usually a few cents to a couple of dollars. Which means the fee must mostly be justified by everything else: guaranteed adjudication by a date, publication chances for placings, feedback or scores where offered, the credential value of a shortlist at a respected competition. A ten-dollar fee that buys a judged reading, a possible credit and a returned score is a rational purchase; the same fee buying a silent lottery ticket is not.
Set a personal ceiling and an annual budget: many working writers cap single fees around twenty to twenty-five dollars, spend under a hundred a year, and skip anything above their ceiling regardless of prestige, because above that line the mathematics almost never works. And never pay fees you cannot cheerfully lose; contest entry money is spent the moment you press submit, and treating it as an investment with expected returns is the mindset scammers harvest.
The refusal cases, specifically
Refuse when fee and prize are inverted: forty dollars to win two hundred is a fundraising scheme with a rosette. Refuse anthology-model contests where everyone wins inclusion in a book you are then invited to buy; that business sells books to entrants, not stories to readers. Refuse contests that charge extra for judging feedback of unverifiable quality, charge to see results, or auto-enrol you in paid critiques. Refuse rights grabs: any contest claiming publication rights over all entries has priced your story into the fee.
Also refuse, politely, the sunk-cost sequel: contests that offer losing entrants a discounted second entry, priority reading for a premium, or tiered entry classes where more money buys more consideration. Honest competitions judge entries, not invoices. A single one of these patterns is disqualifying; two is a business model. The fee question answers itself once you see what is actually for sale.
A decision routine you can reuse forever
Before paying anything: read one past winning story and check you respect it; find the judges' names and one fact about each; locate the rights clause and confirm winners-only, time-limited; compute fee against prize pool and field size; and ask what you receive if you lose. Ten minutes, five checks. Pass, and pay without guilt. Fail, and close the tab without regret; there will be another contest next month, there always is.
Balance the portfolio too. Free contests exist at reputable magazines, libraries and festivals, and belong in your rotation. Fee-charging contests earn their place with feedback, credentials or prize pools your free options lack. And magazine submissions remain free at almost every market on earth, which is the standing alternative every fee must beat: the question is never can I afford this fee, but is this fee a better use of this story's next three months than the top of its magazine list.
What poets can take from this
- Price the fee against everything received, adjudication, feedback, credential, not just prize odds.
- Set a single-fee ceiling and an annual contest budget, and hold both without exceptions.
- One past winning story tells you more than the whole prize page; read it before paying.
- Anthology-model contests that sell the book to entrants are purchases, not prizes.
- Every fee competes with the free alternative: the top of that story's magazine list.
Try it yourself
Write a scene set at an awards ceremony for a contest that is secretly a scam, from the point of view of the one entrant who has begun to notice. Let the details, the venue, the certificates, the book table, do the accusing. No one may say the word scam aloud.
Questions
What is a normal entry fee for a short story contest?
Three to twenty-five dollars covers most legitimate short fiction contests, with mid-tier competitions clustering around ten to twenty. Fees above that need exceptional justification, a large prize pool, a famous judge, included critique, and often do not have it.
Are free writing contests always safe?
No fee removes one risk and leaves the others: rights grabs, vanity anthologies and data harvesting all run free contests happily. Apply the same checks, especially the rights clause, whenever your story and your details are the price of entry.
Can I deduct contest entry fees as a writing expense?
In many jurisdictions writers who file as professionals can treat entry fees as business expenses, alongside submission fees and memberships. Rules differ by country and by whether writing is a business or hobby for you, so confirm with local tax guidance.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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