Bedtime story competition

Walker Books say: "The prize money is comparable with the kind of fee you might expect (as a first-time author) a publisher to pay for a story of this length.

"As far as rights as concerned, it's quite usual to pay a flat fee for this kind of story in an anthology and retain the copyright in the text."

The comp isn't designed for professional writers - it's meant to find new voices. It's an opportunity to get started and be paid (a perfectly fair fee) for a story with the possibility of more work following on from that. You'll have Walker Books, Gransnet and Mumsnet all pushing to get publicity for your work.

Of course, if you think the terms are unreasonable, you'd be better off sending your story to an agent in the usual way (he/she would want to see more than one story of this length). But we think the terms are fair, otherwise we wouldn't have done it. We did look into royalties but it was fiendishly complicated legally with so many authors so we went for a more generous upfront payment instead.

As a published novelist, I think the deal is fine (per word, it's generous compared to most novelists' advances these days) and I would be entering if I were allowed

But it's up to you - there are more traditional routes to publication you can go for if you prefer.

By all means, send it in. The 1500 words is an upper limit only.

for writing a story of any length.

Hi Michelle,

We haven't shortlisted the winning stories yet - Geraldine has explained why here. She says:

'There's been a fair bit of feedback on the comp over on The Other Place, with mumsnetters concerned that some authors could rig the voting by getting all their mates to support them or by creating fake email addresses and mass-voting for themselves (spooked by Christopher Maloney's incredible survival on X-Factor, possibly....)

We've now looked at the judging mechanism internally and with Walker books and we think the objectors have got a point (not that we imagine gransnetters doing such underhand things ) so we've decided that the top ten stories will now not be selected by public voting. The judging panel will agree on the 20 shortlisted stories and, as chair of the judging panel, Michael Rosen will select the final ten stories for publication.

We think this is fairer and avoids any possibility or accusation of vote-rigging. We'll be announcing the 20 shortlisted stories in 'Won anything?' on 28th January as planned and the ten winners very soon after.

The Ts and Cs are here. And for those who entered - we're loving reading them '

Hope that helps!

Congratulations to all 20 shortlisted authors in our Bedtime Stories competition.

Commiserations to those who didn't make it. We had hundreds of stories and many of them were wonderful. There was a lot of heated debate: it was very difficult to cut the list down to 20. All the judges had our favourites and we worked late into the night trying to get agreement.

The shortlist is here on our Won anything? thread.