Writing contest season is here again

One of the consistent strategies used to plump up circulation at literary and cultural magazines in this country is the writing contest. It's an annual, tried-and-true, almost ritualistic enterprise for small circulation literaries from all across the country, usually in the spring. They even advertise each other's contests in "swap" ads. (In fact, there's even a rather hit-and-miss website that compiles information about such contests.)

This is but a sample of such contests: The Fiddlehead (which pays $2,000 for the best story and $2,000 for the best poem), The Malahat Review (the Novella Prize; first prize $500), Geist (Literal Literary Postcard Contest), CV2 (the 2-day poem contest), Grain (the Short Grain contest, with $6,000 in prizes), Arc ($2,250 in prizes), This Magazine ($750 first prize), The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review (Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest), and Prairie Fire.

With variations, the publication announces the contest (the prize for which is usually a small amount of money and the three best entries being published in a forthcoming issue), collects a fee (usually in the $20 to $35 range) and includes for the fee a year's subscription. In most cases this can result in as many as a couple of hundred new subs that count as paid circulation. Plus content that the magazine can run for free.

Of course, what the magazines find is that those eager and hopeful entrants don't convert very well -- that is, they don't renew their subscriptions. If they come back, it is by entering next year's contest. They become serial contest entrants rather than loyal subscribers. In a way they become like those people who subscribe to the subscription premium ( a tote bag or a personal digital organizer) and get the magazine as a bonus.

Magazines find they can't contemplate stopping the contest even if they wanted to. It can be a merry-go-round that it is relatively easy to get on, but very difficult to get off. In particular, no literary wants to have to report that its subs have dropped 200 copies from the previous year when it comes time to fill out the Canada Council or provincial arts council application.

No one has ever done any research, as far as we can tell, to determine what overlap there is among the hard-working poets and short story writers out there entering contest after contest in the hopes of being published and, as a byproduct, becoming subscribers to the magazines that may publish them. And nobody, as far as we can tell, knows what proportion of the circulation of these magazines is underpinned by this strategem; or if the annual contests win over new business that sticks even after the prizes are given out.