In April 2015 Freeditorial.com introduced their first story-writing contest.

At WritetoDone.com, we were partners for this so-called contest.

However, Freeditorial changed the rules during the contest.  Instead of placing value on the literary quality of the stories, they decided to pick the winners solely upon the number of downloads.

We got a lot of emails with valid complaints about this.

Here’s a comment from David Barkey:

I’m disgusted to find out that the contest was determined by the number of downloads, that the adjudicators did not even read the contents of the submissions.

If that is a fact, then this contest was a farce, a disgrace to be called a literary contest. Essentially every one of us who worked on preparing manuscripts wasted our time and effort.

Because Freeditorial has decided not to adjudicate the entries according to their literary value, we cannot endorse Freeditorial Contests any more.

These so-called contests seem to be a monetization strategy. Here is what Freeditorial says about their business strategy:

Here is what Freeditorial says about its business model:

Our innovative business model is mainly based on using advertising space on our online platform.

As you can imagine, the more people download stories, the more money Freeditorial make from advertisers.

Why you need to think carefully, before submitting your story

If you don’t submit your story within the first weeks of a Freeditorial contest, your story will most likely not be seen by others.

If you don’t have a strong following on social media, a large blog, or other ways of mobilizing masses of readers, you won’t stand truly stand a chance of winning. This is because you need high download numbers to win.

In other words, your chances of winning are very, very slim and winning is down to marketing ploys and not down to your quality as a writer.

If you don’t win, your story will remain on Freeditorial and you won’t be able to withdraw it. It is then classed as ‘published’ and you will find it difficult to get anyone else to publish your story because it is already available for free download.

If you win, Freeditorial retains the digital rights. You will never be able to publish it as a Kindle book, for example. Your only option is to publish it as a print book (and we all know print books are going out of fashion fast).

Warning: The Freeditorial Contest is not a true literary competition. Submitting your story may hurt your future chances of success.

Luckily, there are other contests that focus on rewarding literary excellence.

Here is an interesting contest with over $4,500 in prize money:

This is a truly unique writing contest because the focus is on the literary quality of entries and the organizers plant a tree in Kenya for every single entry. Check out this contest here.

About the author: 

Mary Jaksch is Editor-in-Chief at Write to Done. Grab her FREE report How to Write Like an A-List Blogger. Mary has helped thousands of students successfully create outstanding and profitable blogs at A-List Blogging and is the blogger behindGoodlife ZEN.