In late 1953, Quinn decided to run a competition for short fiction from new writers. The competition was only open to college students who had not sold a story before. The first prize was $1,000, the second prize $500, with five runner-up prizes of $100 each. Entries came in from writers who were later to become well known, including Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, and Andrew J. Offutt, whose story "And Gone Tomorrow", about a man unexpectedly sent a hundred years into the future, won first prize and appeared in the December 1954 issue of If. The only other one of the seven announced winners who had a career as a science fiction writer was Leo P. Kelley. Quinn decided to move If to a monthly schedule with the March 1954 issue, perhaps because the competition had increased readership. It reverted to a bimonthly schedule with the June 1956 issue, as circulation dropped again.Ashley, History of SF Magazine Part 4, p. 33.
