Online Poetry Contests – What You Need To Know

1. Online contests are quick and easy to enter with the poem appearing instantly on the website. Usually voting and commenting is a feature of the competition and the site will have tools available for you to promote your work to your friends, family and social media websites.
All of which is great fun and ensures your poem reaches a much wider audience than sending it off to a traditional contest where often it seems to disappear into a black hole of anonymity, never to be heard of again!
This is fine, but if you are not careful you may find that you have entered a popularity contest rather than a bona fide arts competition so check that the winners are not decided on number of votes alone.
This not only devalues the contest, but it can lead to a great deal of ill feeling amongst unsuccessful entrants who are well aware that they have been placed behind inferior work solely through lack of an extended network of friends.
2. Assuming the contest is being judge by a human being try and check what qualifies them to judge a literary competition. If you are serious about your work, you really want it to have ranked high because a knowledgeable expert says so rather than some web designer with an eye for a quick buck.
A well organised contest should at some stage announce the judge, usually from the outset and provide a bio and links to their website if available.
3. Check prizes and entry fees. If a fee is being charged there really should be cash prizes. Occasionally publishing contracts will be offered, but again you need to be wary. Many vanity publishers will hold contests just to attract business to their publishing services. If you are asked to buy expensive books or offered over blown publishing options, beware!
4. Results. Irrespective of whether you win or not, you should have the right to see a full judge’s report and a list of results. Check that these will at least be published on the competition site and preferably emailed to all competition entrants.
5. Anonymity. In spite of the vastness of the web, people do tend to recognise others in their niche. Judges of off-line poetry contests don’t know the authors of the work they are judging and the same should apply to an online competition.
6. Personal data. Even though your entry should be displayed anonymously, you will have to submit some personal data such as email address and full name otherwise the organisers won’t be able to contact you should you win a prize. Check that the contest has a privacy policy assuring you that your personal details are secure and are not shared with third parties.
7. Prizes. The very nature of the web makes it easy for anyone anywhere to enter an online competition. If you enter a contest that offers prizes in a currency other than your own, you need to check that you can receive it. PayPal is a safe payment gateway which will get over the problem for the majority of entrants.
If you wish to receive your prize by cheque, you may run into problems when you try to cash it. Most UK banks charge a ?10 fee to cash foreign cheques which can knock a big hole in your winnings.
That more or less covers what to look out for in an online poetry contest, but where do you find them?