I was thinking about this the other day as I know a person who has yet to make his big break for his business. While creating the work and putting it out there for people to pay for is usually the route most people would go with it was kind of interesting where for this person he wanted money through contests. As an example, think of like a painter. Normally they would create a piece of art and afterwards they would try to sell it to make money. Any other efforts would be to help promote his work more in hopes to get more sales.
But for this person his hope was to keep entering contests where he would go against other artists with the hope that he would beat them all and win say a $5000 prize. Essentially that is how he envisions to make money with his work. Like there people would usually treat these types of contest as something extra that can be a great supplement to what you already to. But solely rely on that as your sole form of business income of sort? That seems so risky.
To me that is almost like playing the lottery. Sure it’s skill based you can say since you are going against real people. But there is still factors that you can’t really control such as whoever is judging it. To me contests should be a bonus or if you are just trying to test the waters to see if you have what it takes to impress people on a broad scale. As well, a way to convince yourself to go all the way and make it a career of sort.