Recently I’ve been seeing a bunch of ads for writing contests in my Facebook feed. Plus I’ve been getting unsolicited mass emails advertising similar competitions. Some of them look pretty legit, but I couldn’t help asking myself why. If it’s such a great contest, why do they need to use spam to promote them? Why not contact me as an influencer and ask me to promote the contest here on the blog? (Many contest promoters do this and if the contest looks good, I add it to our “Opportunity Alerts” section at the bottom of each post. )

Then last week I saw a tweet from industry watchdog Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware saying much the same thing.  She said she’d suddenly been hearing from a lot of writers who were getting direct solicitations from writing contests and she’s seeing the same stuff I am on Facebook. So I thought…