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Meeting Times

Jul10
2019

Green Bay
11:30-3 at 1951 Restaurant, 1951 Bond Street, Green Bay, WI

The Publishing Process

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Jul13
2019

Chippewa Falls
10-12:30 at Deb's Cafe, 1120 122nd St, Chippewa Falls, WI

Topic TBD

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WisRWA Newsletter

Contests

Entering the Fabulous Five Contest

Jan

02, 2019 |

Filed in:

Contests,Fab Five,General

From the prominent New York Times Best Selling author to the newbie who’s just begun their writing career, one of the scariest things you can tell a writer is that someone is going to judge their work. Sometimes just telling a writer that their work is going to be read sends them into conniption fits.

However, writing contests should be considered in a completely different light. Writing contests are an excellent way to receive constructive feedback on your WIP and (in many instances) get your work in front of industry professionals without having to write a query!

When I finally could dedicate time to writing again, I noticed that I felt more insecure about my writing than I ever had before. I was scared to write the stories I wanted to write. I was scared to put any words on the paper, for fear that they would suck. I almost considered giving writing up as a whole. And then I read a blog post about the pros of entering writing contests. I began researching all the writing contests I could potentially enter. Ultimately, I ended up submitting two entries into the Fab Five Contest and it was one of the best decisions I made. I took the entire process as an opportunity to grow as a writer. I wanted to know what people thought of my work when they didn’t know it was mine. It was terrifying, but absolutely necessary.

Let me tell you why:

Each final judge reads all five finalist entries. They issue their own feedback form which includes a section for material requests. Essentially, you can get a partial or full request from an agent or an editor without having to write a query and wait months checking and rechecking your inbox. Now, am I saying that entering a contest should completely replace good old-fashioned querying? No. Not at all. Querying is an important process for a writer who wants to publish traditionally, but that’s a blog post for another time. I’m talking about entering contests, specifically the Fab Five contest opening on January 1^st of 2019.

For all the benefits discussed, one may suspect that entry fees would break your budget. That is not the case. At $25 for WisRWA members and $30 for non-members, the Fab Five prices continue to be some of the most economical among similar contests. So, for a relatively small fee, you can get expert feedback from published authors and the chance to get your work seen (and maybe requested by) industry professionals. I can say from firsthand experience, entering the Fab Five Contest is worth the price and worth facing the fear of judgement. It just may change your life.

As an unpublished author with no critique partners, joining the Fabulous Five contest proved vital to my journey as a writer. In 2015 I took some time off of writing to completely change careers, go back to school, and get my master’s degree. During those years, I felt well…backed up. I wanted to write my own stories, but time and guilt restrained me. I had papers to write, tests to take, and a thesis to research. How could I take an hour or two to outline a romance novel, when I was barely even sleeping? I couldn’t. There was no time. As such, my mood plummeted, my anxiety spiked, and I was miserable.

My number one reason for entering the Fab Five contest was for the feedback, especially because I don’t really have critique partners. Most authors continue the same patterns from beginning to the end of the book and from WIP to WIP. Chances are the mistakes you’re making in chapter one, are the same ones you’re making in chapter twenty. The opportunity to get detailed and constructive feedback on the beginning of your WIP is invaluable. The Fab Five contest has some seriously qualified first round judges looking at all of the things a potential editor or agent would look for: a catchy opening, believable characters, a conflict driven plot, natural dialogue and active narrative, a sense rich setting, and a unique style. Say you are like me and don’t even realize that you have no dialogue in your WIP until about page five… Don’t worry, the judges will figure it out relatively quickly and tell you in their feedback. Perhaps you are a bit lacking in setting. The judges will let you know. Maybe your work is absolutely fantastic, but only requires some grammatical tweaks. The judges will let you know that too. The Fab Five first round judges try their very best to give detailed and useful feedback on every entry they read, but even then they don’t always agree. Every judge is different and so are their opinions, which is why the lowest score is always dropped when calculating placement in the category (unless there’s a tie) That info is available in the official rules here: 2019 Fab Five Rules Once scores are complied, five finalists are selected in each category and sent to an agent and an editor for final judging.

This leads me to the second reason for entering: the opportunity to get one’s work in front of industry professionals without having to query first. If you’re anything like me, just the thought of writing a query letter, that may or may not lead to a request, sends you into cold sweats. It’s extremely intimidating to think that a few paragraphs can determine whether or not someone decides how interesting and worthy the project (you spent years trying to perfect) is. Entering the Fab Five contest and being a finalist means that both an agent and an editor are going to read the first 2,500 words of your manuscript! There are no queries or even a synopsis needed to enter, so the judging comes directly from that small snippet of your work. I know that last sentence will freak some people out, but consider this: if an entry finals, it has gone through three other judges who considered it worthy of potentially winning. That means those first few pages are filled with some seriously good writing. That alone is a huge confidence boosting compliment.

by: Natalie Caña

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Contests, Fab Five, Natalie Caña, Romance Writing, WisRWA