Flash Fiction Contest Drives User Engagement for Writers Festival

The Ubud Writers & Readers Festival has found success online with their crowd sourced writing competition, Kilat! Flash Fiction Challenge.

Since it’s launch on the 17th of August, the Kilat! site has drawn more than 800 entries, almost 6,000 comments and more than 17,000 votes from site visitors. Visitor traffic has steadily risen to nearly 20,000 page views a day with visitors coming from 88 countries.

“We wanted to not only raise awareness of the Festival but also to provide a forum for young Indonesian writers to find a voice,” states the Festival’s Co-Director, Sarah Tooth. “By posting on the website, the writers have a chance to gain an audience and to get feedback from readers. During the Festival itself the winning Kilat! entries will be published in a zine format and distributed to the attendees, and we’ve also created an event at the Festival that is specifically for the Kilat! participants and fans.”

The online contest was created for the Festival by water&stone, a digital agency based in Bali.  water&stone partner Ric Shreves notes “this is the sort of promotion we love to see. It’s inherently creative and, with the strong passion felt by the audience, it’s the perfect vehicle for user generated content and broad engagement.”

Shreves states “for promotion of the contest we’ve relied almost exclusively on social media channels and forum seeding. Facebook, Twitter and Kaskus.com have been particularly effective at reaching the local Indonesian audience. While the contest is open to both English and Indonesian language entries, Indonesian entries have been outpacing the English entries by a rate of eight to one. Comments are even more slanted towards the Bahasa Indonesia entries.”

Flash fiction, a form of short fiction, is a prose format with a limit of no more than 350 words. Contest entries are accepted in either English or Bahasa Indonesia via the Kilat! website. Visitors to the site can read, comment and vote on the entries.

The Kilat! Flash Fiction Challenge is open until the 24th of September. The winners will be announced on October 1. You can visit the site at http://flashfiction.ubudwritersfestival.com

2010 marks the seventh year of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. This year’s Festival will be held from 6 to 10 October in Ubud, Bali. You can follow the Festival online at:

•    The Festival website is the most comprehensive source of information; it can be found at http://www.ubudwritersfestival.com
•    Follow the Festival on Twitter, at http://twitter.com/ubudwritersfest.
•    On Facebook, become a fan of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival at http://www.facebook.com/ubudwritersfest.