Writing Competitions 2024 Free Entry Novels & Stories

I just submitted to The Masters Review Flash Fiction contest last month—first place gets $3,000, which is solid for under 1,000 words. The caveat is their editorial taste leans toward crisp, literary prose with a twist; my more genre-bending piece got a polite pass last year. Another reliable one is the 'Saturday Evening Post' Great American Fiction Contest. It pays $500 for the winner and publication in a magazine my grandparents actually recognize, which is a weird flex but kind of charming. Not the hugest purse, but the prestige opens doors.

For pure cash, the BBC National Short Story Award is massive (like £15,000), but it's ultra-competitive and has specific eligibility around UK connection. I treat those as my annual 'reach' submissions. Honestly, don't sleep on genre-specific contests either—'Asimov's Readers' Award' or the Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine contest often have lower entry numbers and decent payouts if your story fits the mold. My strategy is mixing one 'dream' contest with a couple of mid-tier ones per season to balance hope and realism.

Been looking into this while planning next year's projects, and honestly, it's frustrating how scattered the info is right now. Major contests like the 'Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest' or the 'Bridport Prize' haven't posted their 2025 windows yet—they usually announce dates in late fall. I spent an hour on one literary magazine's site only to find a banner saying "2024 submissions closed, 2025 info coming January." Feels like a waiting game.

My advice? Set up a spreadsheet with the contests you care about, track their 2024 deadlines as a reference, and mark your calendar to check their websites around November. Most repeat yearly, so last year's date plus or minus a week is a decent guess. Saves you from the last-minute panic when they finally drop the guidelines.

I'm skeptical of most free contests, honestly. Too many feel like data collection or anthology-mill schemes, where you 'win' a spot in a pricey collection you have to buy. But I found one exception last year: 'The First Chapters Prize' from The London Library. No fee, open internationally, decent prize money and mentoring. I entered on a whim, didn't win, but the feedback was genuinely thoughtful—more than I got from some paid submissions. The key is vetting: if it's run by a legit literary journal, university creative writing department, or a major publisher's imprint, it's usually okay. Random websites promising 'exposure'? Run.

WordHunt (formerly Scribophile's) quarterly contests are another solid free option. You need to critique others' work to earn karma points to enter, which keeps the community serious. The prizes are small but real, and the feedback you get during the process is the real value. Helped me tighten a short story that later got published elsewhere. I'd take that over a hundred no-feedback rejections from random places.