Do it if you must, but having served on the judges committees for several authors and other creative competitions, I can tell you first hand that most of these are rigged.
When I first got invited to be a judge -- it's a long story how that happened -- I naively went into it thinking, wow, I can really play a part in rewarding someone with real talent and getting their career going!
But, as it turns out, those contests aren't about picking the most talented. More often than not, they are meant to ENCOURAGE young artists but REWARD specific people who have pre-existing political connections to the contest organizers. It isn't always an obvious political connection either. It could be as little as a major judge knowing a relative of competitor, and wanting to be able to go to a party in the future and congratulate that relative in person.
On two separate occassions, there was a clear winner based on talent alone, and in one case, the judges had even unanimously agreed who the winner was, some no-name poor kid whom it turned out had been a bit of a trouble maker in school (I found out later), but WOW this kid could WRITE! We ALL agreed. It was no contest. This kid deserved it, and the second place choice was really good but missing some things here and there.
Well, don't you know, they read the results, and the second place kid we all picked ended up placing FIRST!!! WTF? Apparently they decided that the trouble maker couldn't have possibly written his story. (But we, as judges, interviewed every one of the authors, and we grilled this kid. We even asked him questions about writing style! This kid was legit. There was no way he fooled us. He wrote his story, I would stake my life on that. We all would have.)
BUT, the head judge had the power to overrule our choice, and they did. This kid (now second place) was so disappointed. It crushed him. I don't know whatever happened to him, whether he went on to write or gave up right there and then. But that was the end of my interest in EVER being a judge again.
Sure enough, I found out that the kid picked for first place had a mom who worked for PBS. Interestingly enough, the topic of his story was the topic of a PBS show that aired weeks later. Makes ME wonder whether HE actually wrote HIS story, because there were some things that he never really answered during our interview. Seemed like an honest kid, but in hindsight it made me wonder, and he really avoided answering some of the questions and we hadn't noticed at the time.
Anyway, enter if you like just because you want some encouragement or exposure, but DON'T enter with an expectation or hope to "win".
Frankly, now that I went through that experience, I've noticed that the winners of MOST contests are never the best of the bunch. That kind of politics probably happens in every single contest ever held.
