| | | Below is a list of UK competitions whose prizes are awarded to the most skillful entrants (skill comps). With practice you can improve your skills in slogan
competitions and the like, but there is nothing you can do to make yourself luckier - hence my dislike of draws. Draws are for the slave to fortune - and that goes double for Internet draws where you have no envelopes on which to deploy lurid inks, pathetic pleas or salacious drawings in an effort to stand out from the crowd. I’ve won a veritable warehouseful of prizes plus the 7 cars, and I’ve sweated for every one. If I’d wasted my time on draws, this site would be devoted to
the story of how I won a T-shirt and a voucher for £50 off my next world cruise. Of course, if you’re prepared to enter draws by the thousand, you can narrow the odds a bit, but your time would be better spent developing skills with slogan and other tiebreaker competitions (see Be a Winner
).
Mind you, I don’t recommend that you become obsessed with competitions in the way I have in the past, nor should you employ the sort of extreme (and often dishonest) tactics used by the compers in my
novel. Keep comping as a hobby. But
when you do it, do it like a competitions pro rather than a dabbler.
| | | | UK Slogan & Other Competitions | | 
| | Cutest Pet Contest. This competition comes from the International
Pet Owners Club in the USA. It is open worldwide. Any kind of pet is eligible, they say. I can rememeber the days when pet rocks were all the rage. I wonder what the contest judges would make of a picture of one of those? Or a cyber pet? Entry is free, but you can only send in one entry every eight months.
Closing: At regular intervals.
Prize: $1,000.
Task
: Take a photograph of your cute pet.
Comp Page: Click Here. |
| | | | | But first a word from our sponsor. Hi. I’m Michael Shenton, creator of this website and author of
Stiff Competition, the comping story that won the Peter Pook Humorous Novel Competition. People who are looking for me through search engines can
remember just about everything about the website save its name and, more distressingly for me, my name. They search for ‘Peter Pook author’, ’the man who wrote Peter Pook’, that bloke who won the cars’ and all manner of other odd things, but never
‘Michael Shenton’. The sole purpose of this site is to get my name known in the hope that one day dozens of people will buy my current novel and any others I manage to get published. So would you all kindly make a note of it. Michael Shenton. Thank you. |
| | | | The Big Picture - The Telegraph Photography Competition.
Closing: Weekly.
Prize
: A Nikon Coolpix S640 digital camera worth £250.
Task: Send in one of your photos (visually appealing, original and self-explanatory).
Comp Page: Click Here. |
| | | | Yzen Caption Competition. This is a simple monthly comp you might like to take a shot at now and again, just to help sharpen your wit.
Closing: End of each month.
Prize: A bottle of bubbly.
Task
: Supply a caption for the picture (changes each month).
Comp Page: Click Here. |
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| Note:
In slogan comps with a word limit, there is some disagreement over how to count contractions such as ‘can’t’. Some say they count as one word, others that they count as two. Logically, when two words have been glued together you then have only one word, but logic doesn’t always come into it as comps are often run by women. Therefore you might like to err on the safe side.
[Joke Alert: Only kidding about women, ladies. Please don’t send me
any more severed horses’ heads - there’s no room left in my freezer.] |
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