There is one 1st place prize per each of the following categories:

Short-story — $1,000 Under 7,500 words

Novelette — $1,500 From 7,500 to 17,499 words

Novella — $2,000 From 17,500 to 39,999 words

Novel — $3,000 40,000 words and over

We’re launching software that connects authors with beta readers to get early feedback on their fiction work. This competition is a way for us to launch our service and allow authors to try it out while we’re still in beta mode. Our goal is to give you a chance to share your work with beta readers without having to self-promote. We’re not an agency or publisher, and don’t help you to promote your work to those companies. We’re about connecting you to beta readers - for free.

Our prizes are monetary, we're not a literary agency or publisher and don't offer publishing deals.

Submissions are due by December 1st, 2019 at midnight EST. Winners will be notified on February 3rd, 2020. On that date, the writing in each category with the highest score will win the prize for that category. In the rare instance that more than one piece of work achieves the highest score, prize money will be split equally.

To qualify for scoring and winning:

Work must not have been withdrawn prior to December 1st, 2019

Work must have at least 10 completed reader ratings (so submit soon!)

It’s free to enter, and we promise there’s no hidden costs or follow up solicitations. We don’t charge authors, ever. And we never spam.

There are no hidden fees, promotional offers, advertisements, or any other nonsense. Writer’s won’t pay a penny, nor are we trying to sell anything to authors.

You're free to submit already-published stories to our contest, we don't require any form of exclusivity or claim any rights.

The software is designed to give you real, honest feedback. We match your work with readers for you, which means you won’t be able to self-promote or share your work with family and friends for more points. This way, we can ensure everyone has a fair shot. This isn’t an author popularity contest, it’s all about your writing.

fresh.ink is a platform that will connect your writing to highly targeted beta readers for ratings, engagement analytics, and valuable feedback. Our judging process works the same way. Rather than using a small team of editors to decide, we’ll match your work with a subset of readers on our fresh.ink mobile reading app. Each reader will see the title and description of a few dozen contest entries, and can choose one of these entries to begin reading. We measure the following metrics and share them with you:

Impressions - how many matched readers saw your title and description

Opens - number of readers who opened your piece and began reading

Completions - number of readers who finished your writing

Rating - star rating out of 5

Structured feedback - we also ask readers to complete some beta-reader questions about what they enjoyed, disliked, found confusing etc. This isn’t used in the contest, it’s just for you.

We want to be very transparent, and our scoring formula is a little nuanced, so the fresh.ink author’s dashboard shows a live real-time view of your score and position throughout the contest. Here’s how we calculate the winning scores:

Entrants are scored out of 300:

Your average “choose” rate Eg 10% (10 points)

Your average completion rate Eg 50% (50 points)

Your average star rating, multiplied by 20 Eg 4.22 stars (4.22 * 20 = 84.4 points)

10 + 50 + 84.4 = 144.4 points.

Submissions are due by December 1st, 2019 at midnight EST. Winners will be notified on February 3rd, 2020. On that date, the writing in each category with the highest score will win the prize for that category. In the rare instance that more than one piece of work achieves the highest score, prize money will be split equally.

To qualify for scoring and winning:

Work must not have been withdrawn prior to December 1st, 2019

Work must have at least 10 completed reader ratings (so submit soon!)

We use an application process to ensure high-quality writing for our readers. You’ll be notified as soon as a decision is made. We’ll do our best to provide feedback, but in the cases where we reject work, it’s because we don’t think we’ll have enough readers that are interested in your genre, topic or writing style.

fresh.ink maintains a community of beta readers by ensuring they are consistently matched with high-quality, relevant and unique writing. If we analyze your work and don’t think we can find enough readers to match it to, we’ll not be able to accept your entry. This shouldn’t be taken as a reflection on your writing, but rather a mismatch between fresh.ink’s reader demographics and your target audience.

Sorry, but we don’t accept fanfiction or other derivative work (unless you own the rights to the original).

You must be 18 years or older and own the rights to the work you’re submitting. Although we don't require you to reside in the United States, winners will be paid via ACH bank transfer or check (depending on your preference) in US dollars. Please make sure you can accept at least one of those two options before applying.

We require all submissions to be in US English at this time. We hope to localize later!

You may submit as many times as you like, as long as each submission is a distinct piece of work. fresh.ink can spot even subtle duplicates!

fresh.ink makes no claims to any rights over your work, even if you win.

fresh.ink never makes your work searchable (either publicly on search engines such as Google, or within fresh.ink), readers must always be logged in and they can’t see work that they weren’t explicitly matched with. You can also opt in to take full control of who gets access to your work, approve any readers before they can open your story and limit how many readers can read your work. And of course, you can instantly withdraw and delete your work at any time via your fresh.ink dashboard and we’ll stop matching it to new readers, remove it from existing matched readers, and give any readers that are currently reading 90 days to finish before deleting it from their device automatically.

Our platform does perform some light editing to your work. These fall into two categories:

Formatting changes to support the mobile reading app.

Fixing spelling and grammar issues we identify. You are granted full rights on all edits we make, and you’ll be asked to approve any changes.

This is phase 1 of building our author reader matching platform - we want to change the way authors get feedback and iterate those critical final drafts. Our vision beyond phase 1 involves playing a hand in connecting authors with legitimate, reputable literary agents, and helping authors opting for the self-publishing route to monetize their work. But right now we’re heads down on building the best possible feedback platform for authors and readers alike.

Yes. Any feedback you receive from readers is yours - and it’s valuable stuff!