It's not rocket science. It's simple arithmetic. 

I entered over 170 contests in 2024. Going by the number of contests that currently show up as "published books" in my public stack of contests (103, three or four of which are 2025 contests) that would mean that roughly 40% of indie contests collapse before concluding. 

Does this mean contests are not worth it? YMMV. Filling out forms can be a nuisance, and it does take time, so if you have other things to do with your time, this is something you should consider. On the other hand, that works out to one contest every two or three days. Got fifteen minutes or so to kill? You might as well fill out a contest form. Some contests require you to read and comment on the books of the hosts and judges, but there is a lot of overlap. Enter a lot of contests, and you will find yourself encountering the same judges over and over. You may already have made that part of your payment before you've finished filling out your form.

Ancilla won 49 writing awards in 2024. Wild Is the Wind won 9 awards for its art. Excavations won 13 awards and was shortlisted for the Ambys (I'm going to assume it didn't actually win an Amby, or I would have been notified by now. Today's date is January 4, 2025). Morsels: Tales of Love and Passion won... uh, I haven't counted yet. Sorry. It's won a few things. Let's use the number 5 for now. Five things. Five of the stories in the anthology were longlisted for The Shortys, so five seems like a good number. 

Total awards won, more or less: 66. That's 38% of the total contests I entered, 64% of the contests that now appear in my public stack. (Note: Not all of these resulted in first place awards. I would say only half were first place. Maybe. Also, some of the contests were very small, and I had little to no competition. Some judges will merge your entry into another category if you are the only contestant, and others will cancel the category. I won a first place prize in Literary Fiction because Ancilla was the only entry).

Is that a good percentage of contests in which some kind of award was won? Probably.

How did I achieve it? See the above graphic.