Summary
A write-up for the 2025 Gold Rush Literary Award presented by Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers (expressing Oliver Blakemore's excitement).
I’m new to this. Already having a lot of fun, though. I’m excited to start seeing books from the RMFW community. I have pre-emptive glee at the sense of being a small part in discovering one of the great books to come out in the next few years. Because one of you is about to give me the beginning of a truly great novel. Don’t hold back! I want to see your book thrive.
Let’s do this.
A few weeks ago, my co-conspirator Amy Armstrong wrote a blog for you about writing for contests. I’m going to write a more focused blog about our own contest: the Gold Rush Literary Award. (Submission window is open now. Tell your friends.)
Unpublished Novels Spotlighted
The Gold Rush Literary Award is a contest for unpublished novels written by unpublished novelists. Short story, poetry, or non-fiction publication creds are okay, but we want to be part of a base of encouragement that drives people to getting that first novel out into the wild.
The preliminary round of judging is done by a circle of your peers, taking a critical eye to your submission with the aid of some judging tools that have been developed by contest supervisors for over a decade now, to the point that the process is both refined and nimble, enabling a fair and competitive process.
After the first two rounds of judging determine the contest’s finalists, those few submissions that make it through the process get put in front of a panelist of VIP judges. Our VIP judges are industry professionals—agents, editors, and publishers (this year they’re all agents).
These professionals volunteer, because the process of our contest puts a handful of already-vetted novel openings in front of them. It’s a pretty cool opportunity.
So in addition to the cash prize and the shiny trophy, finalling in the Gold Rush Literary Award puts your novel in front of an agent.
Glow Up!
Finishing a novel, period, is hard and worth celebrating. Pushing that novel through into a spotlight of any kind requires a lot of strength. We hope that the Gold Rush can be some part of the energy that encourages you to push through and show off your novel. Even being in a position to enter a contest like the Gold Rush puts you in a very small group of people who even finished a novel, let alone decided to submit it to a contest.
If you enter your novel into a contest of any kind, I applaud you.
So if you enter into the Gold Rush Literary Award, I hope you realize how much of an accomplishment it is to even do that.
When you do, tell your friends! Tell your family. Tell your teachers. It’s an impressive accomplishment!
And if your novel turns out to be one of the finalists, I’ll probably be making you a shiny virtual badge of some sort that you can show off.
And if you win, that will be an interesting day.
As for the rest of you…
I know that the main readership of this blog is writers. And I know that not everyone reading this will be entering the Gold Rush, for one reason or another. Either you’re published, or you’re mainly a short story writer, or maybe contests aren’t for you. Or maybe your novel isn’t ready yet, and you’re planning on next year. All good and correct.
Whichever group you belong to, you are still uniquely suited to understanding how stressful, and how cool, it is to enter your novel into a contest.
So I hope that everyone reading this will do two things.
First, encourage your writing friends to enter. It’s frightening to put your book on the line, but it’s also empowering. The encouragement of peers may be exactly what your friends need to have to feel up to the challenge.
And second, if you know someone who will be (has already) entered their book into the Gold Rush Literary Award, let them know you’re excited for them.
It’s a cool award. You ever entered it? Have you won? How was the experience?