The Easy Path to Publication is paved with Your Dollars

The above quotation by Allan Lefcowit in “Before You Write That Check” (http://www.writer.org/scamkit.htm) is very apt when you consider certain organizations’ blatant operations, commonly called “literary scams.” The phrase refers more specifically to the working of those organizations which claim to promote writers/poets and their work, yet in reality, their sole function is to extract money from them in the name of contests, services or anthologies.

Poetry contests are the most rampant forms of literary scams. The websites of such organizations (and they operate under many different names) heavily advertise poetry contests in the form of banner ads inviting poets to submit their original work. There is no entry fee and the only requirement is that the poem should be of 20 lines or less. Every poem submitted to them becomes a semi-finalist and is deemed worthy of publication in one of their series of anthologies. But there is a catch. To actually see that ‘hard bound anthology’ you will have to pay a certain amount. And if you don’t know that legitimate publishers pay the author and not the other way around, you are definitely going to be compelled to think that this is the normal way of things, and buy the anthology.

But it doesn’t end there. You will keep on receiving letters which will invite you to get your poem printed on a plaque, recorded on a tape with music and the grand finale, your poem most certainly will be nominated for some grand sounding award and you will be invited to the ceremony. But the bottom line everywhere is that you have to pay for every single service.

The infamous organization engaging in this scam is the International Library of Poetry (http://www.poetry.com), also operating under names such as the International Society of Poets, National Library of Poets, and Watermark Press etc. Wind Publications (http://www.windpub.com/literary.scams) did an analysis of their earning and the atrocious sum is reproduced here from their website.

1997-- 44 anthologies were made and published.
1998-- 78 anthologies were published.
1999-- 52 anthologies were published. (one per week!)
2000-- about 50 or more . . . (I’m tired of counting.)

You can easily verify these numbers. They are from the ILP website. Go to poetry.com and click on "Anthologies" where you’ll find a list of names of every book, and its release date.

Calculation of anthology income
-- an amazing estimate --
50 books/yr x 600 pages
x 6 poets(or poems)/page x $50/book =
about $9 million each year

Taken from http://windpub.com/literary.scams/counting.htm

So what makes this a scam?

A few years ago, Wind Publications ran the story of Brian Holmes. He emailed a letter of inquiry to poetry.com and a few days later, received a letter informing him of being a semi-finalist. The letter was actually posted on the website as a poem (removed of course when the error was discovered). This led him to conclude that the poems submitted to poetry.com are never read. Instead a standard letter is sent out to everyone who submits a poem.

This was further confirmed by the story of Dave Barry (http://windpub.com/literary.scams/D-Barry.htm). After he received his letter, he called on the phone number given. He asked the lady who responded, the criteria the organization had had, while selecting his poem as a semi-finalist. The lady answered vaguely that she will have to search for the poem. When asked about what the general requirement regarding the standard of poems accepted as semi-finalists is, the answer was that it must be 20 lines or less.

Another ‘test of legitimacy’ on this organization has been described in “Would-be Poets and Scam Artists” by Allan Andrews (http://www.toad.net/~andrews/scam.html). Professor Jenijoy LaBelle, professor of Literature at Caltech, carried out this test. After going through the advertisement of poetry.com she convinced three of her friends to make a submission. The first friend submitted a collection of random sayings from fortune cookies. The second one submitted a poem of Emily Dickinson. The third wrote what the article aptly called “irrational doggerel” and submitted that. All three received the letter of being a semi-finalist and worthy of being published in an anthology for which they would have to pay $ 49.95 plus $ 4 for postage and handling and an additional $ 20 for poet’s biography, $ 38 for publishing the poem on a plaque and $ 29.95 if they wanted it recorded on a cassette tape. The list went on.

First Hand Experience

Every year these organizations hold a poets’ convention where they claim to crown the Poet of the Year or present some sort of award to selected poets.

An interview of Theresa Coleman by Charles Hughes of Wind Publications (http://www.windpub.com/literary.scams/bigmoney.htm) who attended one such convention a couple of years back is an eye-opener. Attendance at the conference cost $ 595 excluding airfare and hotel charges. And unlike what the invitation letter claimed about the crowd being minimal, there were around 4000 poets, ALL nominated for the Poet of the Year. In her words, “They invited so many poets that we had to read our poetry in a small room (NOT on a stage as they wrote in their letters, and NOT in front of editors and publishers as they promised) all in one day. They split us up into two groups, with each group divided into smaller groups of 40, in which we were all sent to different rooms to read our contest entries where WE were to be each others judges.”

Moreover, she went on, the winners were pre-decided. This was discovered through the fact that people were still reading their poems up to 4.30 pm and the winners were announced at 5.30. How can anyone choose between 4000 poems in just one hour? They also made a joke of their promise to formally induct the attending poets in the International Society of Poets. Coleman says, “There was NO ceremony, this is how they "inducted" us: At the Friday night dinner, the M.C. asked for all of the people who were attending their first convention, to stand. After we all stood up, he waved his arm from one side of the room to the other and then said, "Okay, you’re all inducted. Sit back down." That was our "ceremony!"

It appears that even young poets are mercilessly exploited. “There were plenty of children there because they had a special $1,000 scholarship for the "Young Poet of the Year." I sat at a table at dinner the first night with two nine year olds and their parents. The mothers were furious because they obviously had to pay to escort their children,” noted Coleman

Just how much did they earn? Multiply 4000 by 595 = $ 4,380,000

Why Blame the Poetry Contests Only?

Literary agents and book doctor services work in league to constitute a major part of literary scams. How this works has been illustrated in the article by John Blesso. Blesso submitted his manuscript to Aardvark Literary Agents. Soon he received a response from its president, Charles Neighbours, who wrote to say that he would be happy to sell the book, if the services of a book doctor, Edit Ink, were utilized for editing and putting the finishing touches on the manuscript. The very next day, Blesso received a letter from Edit Ink, which said that Blesso’s manuscript had been submitted to them for editing which they would be happy to do for a reasonable price. Blesso saw through the scam. Legitimate literary agents never do any editing for the manuscript; they do not even go through the whole of it. To confirm his suspicions, Blesso changed the title of his manuscript and the author’s name and re-submitted the manuscript. Sure enough, he received the exact same reply both from Neighbours and Edit Ink. Did Neighbours pocket a commission on the manuscripts he referred to Edit Ink? Very likely. A lawsuit against Edit Ink has revealed that the literary agents and publishers received 15% commission for every manuscript submitted to Edit Ink. It also appears that they charged $ 5 per page for their services, and generated $ 5.5 million in fees through their service. Find out more on http://www.sfwa.org/beware/Editink.html.

At the end of the day, the concern of these organizations is not publication, not poetry and certainly not promoting aspiring writers or poets. From start to the end, it’s all about the money.