Taking the next step

We are seeking to expand the Global Short Story Competition but need funding to do so.
The competition was established six years ago and is now run by Darlington-based Inscribe Media Limited, whose director John Dean was one of the four founders and is a creative writing tutor and published crime novelist.
The idea was to give a voice to aspiring writers around the world and support the efforts to save the short story. We want to encourage writers as best we can and to make the point that storytelling is a truly global pasttime, that great stories are being written every day the world over.
We’re looking for those writers striving towards their big break but will happily take stories from anyone. What we want to do is showcase talent that, in many cases, is not yet widely recognised. Also, we like to see writers earning money from their writing - we have already paid out more than £10,500 in prize money.
Its selling point is that it is monthly and international. It‘s a strong combination. Entrants come from all over the world but a lot from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, America and Continental Europe. We would love more from the likes of Asia, Africa and South America and are working towards that.
Some of our winners have taken great encouragement from their success and gone to break into print and we delight in that. We post the monthly winner and highly commended stories on our website and have also published several ebooks featuring writers who have entered the competition, both anthologies and novels.
We would like to see many more stories coming in each month. If we bring more income in, we can run more, genre-driven competitions as well but we are dependent on income from the competition as we are a small company.
To expand, we plan to launch additional competitions, each of them annual. The first three would be: Crime writing, Sci-fi fiction and Horror/ghost fiction.
If you are interested in becoming a sponsor or finding out more, please contact John Dean at deangriss@btinternet.com