The purpose of this contest is to encourage you to challenge yourself with long form fiction. As writers you will already know that the longer you make your story the more difficult it is to finish. Just completing a longer work of fiction is an accomplishment in and of itself.
This contest encourages you to write longer than you have been. Most stories for Stone Soup are 5,000 words or less. We have set the minimum word length to 8,000. There is no maximum.
As you write you may keep in mind as inspiration the teenage-written novel, Frankenstein. Mary Godwin was eighteen when she began writing Frankenstein. It was published two years later. Mary had married. She took her husband’s last name. It is by that name that we know the author of Frankenstein as Mary Shelley.
Writing long form fiction is the best practice you can get to stretch your writing on multiple levels. We expect you to struggle on your own.
AI use: If you use AI for factual research, then please be sure to follow up by checking references to be certain what it has told you is true. Besides research, please limit AI use to spelling. Please do not as a human or AI to evaluate your grammar. Non-standard grammar can be a stylistic choice.
What we do want you to do is to read your work aloud to yourself. Trust yourself. If it sounds right to you then accept that. If your work is accepted for publication, then, at that time we will evaluate grammar and punctuation.
Here is how the contest works.
Every work of long-form fiction we accept and publish at StoneSoup.com between 1 September 2025, and 31 August 2026 is entered into this contest. If your work is accepted by Stone Soup between September and the end of August, then it is automatically entered into the contest.
The judges will select from amongst those accepted for publication at Stone Soup those that win this contest to be published as print books. The number of manuscript we will publish as books is not set in advance. We will publish in book form as many of the entries as the judges feel meet book publishing standards.