Every so often, something lands in the literary world that cuts through the noise. This year it was a headline that made writers’ eyes light up: the world’s richest short story competition is now open. And the icing on the cake? It’s free to enter.
This international short story prize comes to us from Fableration, a Melbourne not-for-profit that builds its publishing tools on blockchain and AI.
The claim sounds almost cheeky: technology as liberator, not thief for training.
But the detail is what stopped people scrolling. Fableration is an NFP and is charging no entry fee to its short story competition, and offering a first prize worth about the same as a small apartment deposit, paid in Bitcoin.
For an industry where “payment in exposure” has become a punchline, that’s almost radical.
A quiet rebellion
Simon Harding, Fableration’s CEO, says the goal isn’t just to hand out money. “We want to make storytelling fairer — and faster to reach readers,” he told inkl.
“If Fableration stands for anything, it’s removing barriers so writers can create without constraints.”
He doesn’t sound like a tech founder rehearsing lines. More like a teacher who’s tired of watching bright students give up.
He talks about published writers unable to focus on their work and working full time in other jobs because of the low financial benefit received by most. About emerging writers worn down by rejections, about readers scrolling through endless sameness, desperate for something that surprises them or within that odd little niche that they love.
“Algorithms decide what people see and what they don’t,” he said, almost shrugging. “That’s not curation — that’s captivity.”
So Fableration built a different kind of gate — one made of code and community instead of hierarchy.
How it works
Anyone over 18 can enter The Fableration World Short Story Competition. The only rule is that each story must be set in the future. It can be in the next minute, next week, next century, or a future only you can imagine. Between one thousand and five thousand words. English language. Original. Simple.
Judging happens in three layers: readers, experts, then the Fableration community again. The readers choose a longlist of fifty; a panel of six industry judges trims it to ten; and the crowd picks the winner.
That mix of democracy and craft is what Harding says will keep the process honest.
“Readers know what moves them,” he said. “We just have to listen.”
Dropping the fee
When the competition first launched in April, there was a small entry fee which we all know is normal.
Then Harding received an email from a writer saying she couldn’t afford it and scrapped the fee that day.
“We can’t claim to champion fairness and then price people out,” he said quietly.
Chief Community Officer Lisa Wade, who came from fintech to join the project, remembers the pause before the decision. “One writer spoke for thousands,” she recalled.
“So we changed the rule. It’s not radical to listen; it’s just decent.”
The team extended the deadline and offered credits to those who had already paid. Word spread. Within a week, writers from every continent were signing up. Free. In 2025.
It’s this kind of attitude and action that drives trust in a crossover of technology and literature that could otherwise set off alarm bells for some.
Why pay in Bitcoin?
The top prizes are unquestionably newsworthy: one Bitcoin for first place, three Ethereum for second, ten Solana for third. Others receive smaller cash awards.
As of today, a Bitcoin is worth circa US$110k (about AU$170k).
Wade laughs when asked if it’s a publicity stunt.
“It’s about proof,” she said. “Blockchain has had its villains, sure. But the tech itself was built for transparency. We’re using it to make sure authors really own their words and their rewards.”
Each entry is stamped to the blockchain the moment it’s uploaded. That record can’t be altered or scraped by an AI model hunting for text to mimic.
Harding calls it “a paradox that makes sense — AI protecting writers from AI.”
Bigger than a prize
At first glance, Fableration could be mistaken for another startup promising to “re-invent publishing.” But its whitepaper reads less like a pitch deck and more like a manifesto — half rant, half love letter. It rails against what it calls brokenomics: a system where the people who make the stories are the last to be paid.
Their answer is to flip the flow of money. Smart contracts pay authors and editors first, readers help surface good work, and everyone in the chain sees where the value goes. It’s transparent almost to the point of discomfort — which is precisely the point.
Harding keeps coming back to one simple line: “Writers should be able to live off their words. Readers should be able to find good stories without being manipulated.”
The spark of something larger
Cynics will say they’ve heard it all before. Technology promises salvation and delivers scale. But there’s something disarming about a platform that launches with a short-story prize instead of an app run by a leadership team who remove the entry cost to the prize for all when one asks.
Short fiction has always been the playground of what-ifs, where writers test the edges of language without worrying about shelf space. Making it the centrepiece of Fableration’s launch feels deliberate.
We will learn whether the competition becomes a movement as hoped for by the Fableration team. But for the first time in a long time, writers around the world are being not just invited, but also handsomely paid, to imagine the future.
And that in itself sounds like a story worth telling.
