Trials of Submission

This morning I submitted 12 poems to the Bournemouth Writing Competition 2025. The deadline for submissions is 1/15/2025

For 10 British pounds ($12.31 USD) you can submit three poems, maximum of 30 lines each, or a short story up to 3,000 words. There are no limit to the number of entries one can submit but each set of 3 poems or a single story will cost the same. The main prize is 500 British pounds along with the opportunity for various appearances and such. Details can be found on the site via the link above. Naturally, any winning poems or stories will be published in the Bournemouth University anthology of which the winners will receive a copy.

Of course, given that I live in Florida, USA… I highly doubt I will be putting in appearances at the Bournemouth Writing Festival. Still, 500 pounds is $610.77. That I can use. Even better than that, should one of my poems (slim chance, I admit) at least place in the competition the bragging rights for query letters, author bios, and such are potentially priceless.

Of course, I found this contest fairly late in the game. This naturally left little to no time to craft brand new poems or stories so… I began an exhaustive search through my own personal portfolio.

Having gone through my rather extensive collection of poetry, I chose 22 poems as potential entries. The issue, of course, is the 30 line maximum requirement per poem. This caused many of my best works to immediately not be eligible. Of the 22 I chose, some few I had to finesse, finagle, and jury rig to make them 30 lines. Having chosen my potential entries, I printed them. My next step was to have my wife’s 82 year old uncle, a published poet, my 37 year old daughter, and a 59 year old friend read the potential entries and grade them on a scale of 1 to 5 stars.

So, at 5 a.m. EST this morning I went through the stack… checking the ratings received by my beta reader group, small though it was. Between that and my own rather biased opinions, I whittled down to 12 entries. Four sets of three … 40 pounds… basically $49.

It took me about one and a half hours to then copy, paste, edit, and create four documents of three poems each. These were then sent t0 the entry site along with the order number of my purchase and a 75 word author bio.

One good thing about Bournemouth rules is that they have basically no formatting requirements for poetry. You may submit them in whatever layout you believe showcases them best. Also, I queried them about images and/or emojis. Bournemouth has no issue with including such if they add to the poem. Their sole request is to be certain you have the legal right to use of any images you should include. Not unreasonable IMO.

The above is a basic FYI for my fellow vocalists writers who may have ambitions to be published in such a fashion, or just to try their luck at a writing contest.

Below is a link to an article I read in the Writers community here a short bit ago. It delineates and provides links to 10 platforms that accept submissions of various types (poetry, short story, microfiction, etc.). I found it very useful and bookmarked several sites for future perusal.

I hope that some few of you find the above to be useful. Best of luck my fellow scribblers.