February 12th, 2011 at 07:20am
Oh yup. That would be quite cool.
Okay, so for prizes, they can be anything from you commenting on a story of theirs, a link to their profile and/or story in your signature or on your profile, you writing a one-shot for them with the guy of their choice, a banner made for them, etc. Just look around on a few contest pages and see what other people are offering as prizes.
Another way to do prizes is to have a list of 5 things, for example, and say that first place gets to choose 4 things (or have all, just whatever suits), second gets 3 and third gets 2, and perhaps a forth place gets one, even. That usually works quite well, instead of designating what place gets what prize.
Rules are simple things like proper grammar and spelling, obviously sticking to your story's plot, the date it has to be submitted by, whether or not you will allow violence and that kind of thing, length of the story, what has to be included in the summary (e.g. how many words the chapter is, a link to your contest page, a link to your story, what scene they're basing it on, etc), whether or not original layouts and banners will contribute to their points, what they will be marked on, that kinda thing. You don't wanna overload people with info, but you do want them to be informed.
With first place, you could always have it as an option, or both. It could easily be up to the winner to choose, you know?
So obviously, the first thing you're gonna wanna do is advertise it in your story. Your readers are realistically the only ones who are going to want to enter it. Whenever someone posts a comment on your contest thread, it gets put to the start on the contest page, so other people will visit it anyway. But I doubt they're going to read the whole story just to write a one-shot, you know?