Calls for submissions are where a lot of writers pick up paid work. While some calls pay very poorly others can be quite generous.
On the whole, the more a publication is willing to pay the higher the standard of work they produce. For example, a site offering £5 an article is probably producing career damaging junk while a site offering £3,000 a story may be highly competitive but extremely prestigious and worth the extra effort.
Here are some calls for submissions that are open to authors from the UK right now.
Edinburgh International Flash Fiction Award
This one is a flash fiction award which you can enter as many times as you wish. The prize is £500 for a 250-word story. The entry fee is £5 per story. Writers may enter as many times as they wish. The money raised will be used to support the arts in Scotland.
Find out more from the website.
SI Leeds Literary Prize
The SI Leeds Literary Prize, for unpublished female, Black and Asian writers in the UK, is now accepting entries for the 2018 award.
The prize aims to act as a loudspeaker for Black and Asian women’s voices, and a platform to discover exciting new talent, from a group largely under-represented on our bookshelves.
The SI Leeds Literary Prize welcomes submissions of unpublished novels and short story collections. The winner receives £3000. There are two cash prizes for the runners-up.
The prize is a testament to the importance and manifest talent of women and a tribute to the gift of cultural, national, ethnic and linguistic diversity. The prize is important and necessary but, more than that, it is introduced to the world as an act of joy, happiness and the discovery of new work. Join us in celebration.
More details including how to enter can be found on the website.
Call For Submissions: Speculative Masculinities
Paying 8p a word for short stories, £30 for a poem, and £50 for an essay, this is what we mean when we talk about getting a respectable sum for your work.
Galli Books is a new UK-based small press publishing speculative fiction anthologies on social themes. They are putting together an anthology of works diving into issues of masculinity.
In worlds as varied and diverse as the distant past of magical worlds and the far future of this one, models of maleness and masculinity tend to be the same toxic form of masculinity that dominates modern Western culture. We want to interrogate that model of masculinity, to problematise it, and to question it; we want to see other possible models of masculinity, models not centred on dominance and violence and repression of feelings; other role models for men. We are looking for fiction, essays and poetry which do this.
We are particularly looking for submissions from authors from marginalised identities and backgrounds, especially where those identities complicate the author’s relationship with masculinity, including but by no means limited to disabled writers, trans writers, and writers of colour.
You can find out more about this call for submission on their blog.
Open Call for Submissions: Thanet Creative
If you have something you really want to say about the art of writing and wish to do so to raise your profile (as opposed to getting paid cash) then Thanet Creative has an open policy to collaborators. As a charity, they do what they do for the love of it rather than for anyone to make money.
ARticles, poems, and short stories can be about anything to do with writing, the area of Thanet, or by someone from or connected to Thanet. So that is a pretty broad topic space.
Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize
£3000 awarded for the best piece of writing on the topic of ‘Childhood’ – the theme of the 2018 Alpine Fellowship Annual Symposium: June 21st – 24th 2018.
You’ll have to be quick because the deadline is the 15th of March 2018 (just under a week from now).
Details about how to enter can be found here.
Script Room: Script submissions for the BBC
If you are a scriptwriter and want to get in with the BBC, the BBC’s rolling submission program is about to open up for another round. This is not an opportunity to get paid but rather an opportunity to get employed by the BBC. If you are looking to break into writing for television, this is something you cannot afford to miss.
You have from Monday 19th March 2018 until Monday 16th April 2018 to get your entry in.
Script Room is not a competition but a means by which the BBC seeks out the best writing talent. We look for writers with the strongest potential to be developed and produced for BBC broadcast.
More calls for submissions in the UK.
The National Association of Writers in Education maintain a list of open calls for submissions on their website.
The Authors’ Foundation and K Blundell Trust award grants twice yearly to writers with a work in progress for a British publisher. The grants are there to assist with research costs or give authors valuable time to complete work. Find out how to apply here.
If you know of any others, please let us know in the comments below.