How to organize a World Book Day writing contest

Are looking into organizing a World Book Day writing contest but don’t know how to go about it? In this article, we are providing some basic guidelines that you should bear in mind when organizing such a contest. A good option is to use our Writing Contest app, which will allow you to organize and manage it easily. This is an ideal action for World Book Day, but it can also be used in any action in which you want to reach an audience that loves to read and write.

Choose the topic of World Book Day writing contest

It’s advisable to set a specific theme for the contest to make sure that user submissions will be aligned and not too different. This will make it easy for you, or the jury, to compare and score them. That’s just what the Spanish Association of Manufacturers and Distributors (AECOC) did when it organized a short story contest with a specific theme: fighting food waste.

Other options might include defining a starting sentence that participants have to use at the beginning of their text, such as “It was a warm summer night when…” Or requiring that the text mentions a specific reference to the organizer’s product or brand.

Decide what the prize will be before organizing your writing contest

To encourage participation in your writing contest, it’s very important to offer an attractive prize and to make sure you communicate it efficiently when you announce your contest. The prize can be related to your product or service as long as participants deem it valuable. For example, if your business sells baking goods, you could organize a recipe contest. Or, as shown in the following example, a contest asking participants to write a single sentence that will then be used to write a song.

The prize is the single most important item users consider when deciding to participate. This is why Easypromos allows you to create several prizes and add a specific screen in the contest to explain them. Furthermore, there are several alternatives so you can choose how to award the prizes. With the giveaway tool included among them.

You will need to decide if the promotion will give away a single prize or if there will be several distributed among the participants. In the following example, the veterinary disinfectant brand Prevail organized a writing contest where veterinarian medicine professionals had to share funny stories on the job and offered 2 grand prizes and 5 monthly prizes for the best ones.

Set a maximum text length for your writing contest

If you’re not sure whether participants are very keen on writing long texts, organize a short text or single sentence contest and establish a word limit. This will bring down participation barriers and will also encourage the visitors to the gallery to read more submissions. If on the other hand, you aim to attract an audience that loves to read, challenge them with a longer text.

As you can in the image above, the app provides a field where users can write or paste their participating text. The field can also feature the contest theme and control a minimum and/or maximum of characters. This will both inform the participant and restrict participation to only those texts within the established limits.

Display the participating texts on a public gallery

When organizing a writing contest with Easypromos, a microsite with its own URL is created which you can then share on all your channels to promote participation. The microsite consists of several pages which include: A home page that explains the contest and participation requirements. The following page includes the registration form, and the last page confirms participants that their participation has been registered.

Additionally, you can include one more page in the form of a gallery to display all participating texts and allow users to read and share them. If your contest includes a voting phase, you can enable the Easypromos voting system. Make sure, however, to stick to best practices to avoid voting fraud.

The image above shows the tile gallery format of the Eyes On Our Heroes writing contest that the Rochester Eye and Laser Center organized. In this contest, the organizers asked the general public to nominate a member of the county’s emergency services to receive a free Lasik sight correction surgery. After the first round where the finalists were selected by the organizers, the winner was selected by popular vote. Users who wished to cast their vote were able to access all the stories through a public gally which also featured a photo of the nominee.

The image below shows a vertical gallery that displays one participating text per row. Both galleries serve the same purpose: displaying the participating texts and their votes. Whether to use one or the other format is entirely up to the organizer.

Terms & Conditions for your World Book Day writing contest

Make sure you wrap up your contest in a professional manner. The app allows you to create additional pages to host further information. In this particular case, there is a specific section to display the Terms & Conditions and to help you highlight the most prominent aspects of your promotion. Furthermore, when filling out this form, a check box will be enabled so that participants accept the contest’s terms and conditions.

In the following example, you can see the hamburger button that displays all the pages on the contest microsite. In this case, the organizer created an extra page to display the contest’s participation dates and deadlines.

Find out more with this legal guide to writing terms and conditions for online promotions and get a template for your contest’s T&Cs.

You can also design the image and text that will be visible when sharing your contest’s URL on social media. This will make your communication of the contest more efficient as it will highlight the most relevant aspects of your promotion. Participants will also be able to share the contest and their text themselves with the “share” button that will be visible at several stages of the promotion.

Set the participation dates of your World Book Day writing contest

Monta el concurso y define cuántos días estará activo. Con dos semanas para subir los textos y votarlos, si es el caso, es suficiente, pero depende de tu estrategia de comunicación. Durante este tiempo puedes presentar de forma pública todos los escritos en una galería para que los participantes y sus amigos puedan leerlos, si no es que quieres mantener en secreto los relatos.

Promote your writing contest to make it a success

Think about the channels that you will use to promote your writing contest. Use all of your social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as your email database. You can also embed it on your website or blog to encourage visitors to participate. You can even go offline and promote your contest with posters and brochures. Don’t forget to include a QR code to direct users to your online promotion.

Another usual option, especially for short texts, is to allow participation via hashtag+mention from Instagram and Twitter as the example above shows. This strategy makes users participate from social networks and promote the contest at the same time. This format is ideal when the objective is to promote a brand on Twitter or Instagram. However, a Hashtag+Mention writing contest does have certain limitations, such as the impossibility of the organizer gathering participant’s personal data as they don’t fill out any registration form. Furthermore, if participation from Instagram is enabled, the text must always include a photo, which is an essential requirement of the social network.

Both images below and above are from contests that allowed participation via Hashtag+Mention on Twitter and Instagram. The example below is from a monthly short story contest to share participants’ experiences when visiting the Spanish region of Galicia. A participation requirement is to share the story on one of the social networks and it can also include a photo or a video.

Announce the winners of the contest

Once the participation stage has concluded, it will be time to pick the winners. You can do this in several ways: you can pick a winner randomly from among all participants, open a voting stage so that only the most voted texts will move on to the final stage, select a jury to choose the winning text, etc.

Entre las herramientas de difusión encontrarás la posibilidad de compartir un vídeo con la presentación de los ganadores en modo show. Piensa que es el momento que han estado esperando los concursantes, con lo que necesitas difundir de forma óptima el resultado y que sea un evento bien preparado. Consigue generar expectación también en este punto del concurso, pues es otra buena oportunidad para difundir la marca.

With Easypromos you can carry out a final prize draw and publish the winner(s) of the contest on a page in the promotion. This will help you announce the winners in a reliable and transparent way. Among the Easypromos’ promotion tools, you have the option of announcing the winners with the “Show Mode” tool. Keep in mind that this is the moment that participants have been waiting for, so the way you announce the result plays a big role in your contest. It has to be well prepared and it also provides a good opportunity to promote your brand.

There are many ways to promote World Book Day with your clients and followers and to engage bookstores’, publishers’, and authors’ target audiences. Visit our resource center for more ideas on how to promote books online.

Need help to set up your writing contest? Contact us via live chat, we will be happy to help!