Why entering the First 500 Novel Competition might be the best thing you do this year
Hiya pals, I won the live show for the First 500 Novel Competition last year, and in preparation for this year’s competition the lovely people at Jericho have let me come and chat to you about why entering the First 500 might be one of the best things you can do for you and your writing.
Lots of people will say nice things to you
The live show was wonderful. Not only did I get to sit and listen to all the other talented finalists read their work, but I had three separate literary agents say wonderful things about my writing. To my actual face! Which let’s be real, in an industry that is mostly rejection and criticism was a breath of fresh air! I also had some lovely comments in the chat from the audience as they were listening to me read.
After I won the competition, loads of writers reached out to me on Instagram to offer their congratulations and I even managed to impress my Mum. No small feat!
You can win free stuff
Winning First 500 means that I now get free Premium Membership to Jericho Writers for life. I log in at least three times a week because if I have a question about drafting or editing or querying, chances are that Jericho has a masterclass on it. I’ve also been keeping up to date with Becca Day’s Diary of a Published Author series which has helped keep me on track with my own edits, and also offers a great insight into what it is like to be a working writer today.
You have an inbuilt deadline
As well as premium membership, I also won a one-to-one with a literary agent and a Manuscript Assessment with Jericho Writers, and I got a year from winning them to use them up. To take full advantage of these, I needed to keep myself on a strict schedule for drafting and completing my first round of self-edits. Having this deadline has kept me accountable, and I’ve made so much progress on my novel this year.
I had my one-to-one with a literary agent last month where I got some brilliant feedback which was great at helping me tighten up my synopsis and I’m aiming to send my manuscript away for assessment in a few weeks (if I can stop being so precious about it and finally let it go!)
You have an achievement to add to your writer bio
Whether you win First 500 or get shortlisted or longlisted you can add that achievement to your writer bio when applying for other opportunities or when you are querying agents. As a newbie writer, I felt quite intimidated about applying for writing opportunities when it seemed like every other ‘emerging’ writer had seventeen degrees and loads of prestigious writing publications under their belt. Now I have a few wins of my own to add to my writer bio to help me stand out when querying.
You’ll have a compelling opening to your novel
By nature, a competition based on the first 500 words only of your novel means that those 500 words need to be doing a lot of attention-grabbing and heavy lifting. In this attention economy when agents are sifting through hundreds of submissions a week, if you can nail your opening few pages, you’ll be doing yourself a lot of favours in the long run. There are loads of videos on the Jericho website that target how to write a good novel opening, so I would encourage you to watch them and edit your opening 500 words until they are the absolute best they can be.
I’m planning on starting my querying journey at the beginning of next year and I feel so much more confident about it knowing that my opening 500 words is working well and resonates with an audience. That is something I wouldn’t have necessarily known without entering and winning First 500.
Enter the competition
TL:DR: Enter the competition! You have nothing to lose, and if you are a Premium Member you get a free entry. Worst case scenario you don’t get longlisted, but you have a polished opening 500 words of your novel which you’re going to need anyway. Once you have those locked down, you only have to replicate that around 150ish times for your whole book. Easy right? *
*It’s absolutely not easy, I know this. I’ve personally had around 87.5 separate breakdowns about my novel this year. Shout out to my beloved writing group and their patience while I rant at them through the medium of WhatsApp voice notes.