I've been sending short stories into competitions every now and again and usually find in the terms and conditions that (in some shape or form) the entrant signs over the copyright of their work at the point of entering the competion to the organiser/publisher/journal/magazine.

I'm not exactly a prolific writer and sometimes I think I should send the same work into one/two or even more competitions being held simultaneously.

What would happen - do you know/think - if (for example) I sent a piece into a competition closing in January and one closing in February - I happen to be lucky enough to be told I've won a prize in the first one but really I would have preferred to 'win' the second one.

Lo and behold, I am then notified that I have won the second competition.

Neither result has at this stage been made public - only the organisers are aware of the results.

Both have conditions claiming copyright over the work and state that it mustn't be published elsewhere.

Can the author 'properly' choose which competition to withdraw from or does the organiser have an enforceable claim to publish the work regardless of the author's wishes?

I suppose I'm also asking whether the organiser's terms only become enforceable on the winning entries after they've won rather than the organiser having an ongoing copyright over all entries to their competition regardless of whether you win or not.

Have you ever known a competition organiser to try and 'force' a winner to accept their prize over another?

And then I went for a shower and when I woke up, I was still in Dallas...

If anyone knows though ... it would be really helpful

I don't know what the legal situation is, Martin, but I have never heard of an author being prevented from pulling a story from a competition. Writers do this all the time - it's one of the things that drives competition organisers mad.

I think the most likely consequence is that you might get blacklisted by that competition, and be unable to enter again in the future.

I don't think that by entering a competition, one does actually agree to sign the copyright of a story over. What you are agreeing to is just their right to publish the story - copyright usually remains with the writer.

I'd always go over the T&Cs with a fine-toothed comb, and I'd think very hard indeed before I entered a competition which asked me to sign over copyright if the story won. I'd certainly never enter a story where I lost the copyright just by entering. What would happen if you wanted to publish it in a collection or online three years later?

On the other hand, if it's super-high profile, it might be worth it. In my experience, such as it is, the rules are much more usually that you grant them right to publish - the industry term is "a licence" - sometimes exclusively for a set time, sometimes non-exclusively.

Like you, I don't have many stories. The times I've wanted to enter the same story in more than one place, I've just done the sums about what the overlap is, and reckoned that if it won the first one, I'd withdraw it from the second. If that would annoy me too much - the second one is far more prestigious - then I'd probably not enter the first one this year with this story, but make a note to try next year if it's that kind of comp.

Edited by EmmaD at 22:07:00 on 03 December 2013

Thanks Catkin and Emma. That's reassuring - I just didn't know what the 'accepted practice' was in relation to competition rules and regs.

With the copyright issue I was thinking of competitions which insist that they have the exclusive right to publish your work for the next year and the author agrees that they will not attempt to publish it elsewhere - I was calling that copyright - but I see that a licence would be the accurate term - a permit to publish for a fixed period.

When I have entered competitions, up to now I've generally restricted myself to ones where I thought there was a particular fit between me, the story and the competition but I'm wondering whether sometimes I'm just shooting myself in the foot with that approach and a lot of my work just goes on the scrapheap.

I know from involvement I've had in competitions that there are more than a few old soldiers and ex oil rig workers sending the same old yarns into every competition under the sun and I'm pondering the possibilities of adopting a more scattergun approach myself.

It doesn't work for them, it may not work for me but hey, it's a reason to look out for the postman.

Edited by MartinEx at 11:20:00 on 04 December 2013

In general, I think you have to careful here. I submit a lot of stories to magazines and always follow their rules, not just in fact but also in principle. The majority of magazines state that they do not want simultaneous submissions, which is reasonable on the whole (although irritating when a magazine has a record of taking a long time over submissions), e.g. an editor may have already spent time on your story only to have you pull it at the last minute because you found another venue. Quite a few magazines don't tell the author what's happening to their story before getting a yes or no; but that doesn't mean it isn't passing its way through various readers and committees.

In short, it's best to submit one story to one market/competition and wait until you get a result. I once accidentally (wasn't tracking well enough, but do now) sent a story to two top magazines. One took it then, to my horror, the other wanted it too. This happened while I was on a course in Oregon. I told Dean Wesley Smith about it and he said (rightly), "That's a big mistake - X (name of editor of second mag) probably won't forget that". I wrote an apology to X, and it may just be coincidence, but he hasn't taken another story of mine since.

The 'answer' as such is to perhaps write more stories and get them out there so you don't have to be facing this kind of dilemma.

Thanks Terry - good points. And especially important if you're trying to build any sort of relationship with an editor or journal/magazine.

I haven't really gone too far down that route. Mainly, when I'm sending stuff out, it's to public competitions (for booty/prize money)rather than for straightforward publication in a journal. Sometimes they might offer publication in one-off anthologies or newspapers but they wouldn't be competitions in regular journals.

I look on those (perhaps wrongly) as lottery type scenarios, where generally nobody cares who you are or remembers your name from one year to the next.

Although, I guess if I was lucky enough to win a prize and then decided to chuck it back, they might well remember me the next year and might think twice - regardless of the brilliance of my work ;-)