7 Great Ways to Become the Victim of a Poetry Contest Scam
March 14, 2008 by J.C. Hewitt
Don’t do any research about the people holding the contest. Just trust that everyone is legitimate.- Join contests that advertise big, big prizes. Lots of rich, nice people are willing to give away big prizes for a single poem. They just love it. Love it. Love it. Love it.
- Expect your poem (first one you ever wrote) to win a big money. Sure, thousands of other poets probably entered, but your first effort will beat them all. That is a reasonable outcome, right?
- Buy their stuff. When you win and they then ask you to give them money for a plaque, buy the book your poem is in, or pay for a trip to a conference, by all means fork over your money. Everybody deserves to win an out-of-pocket trip to Las Vegas or Miami.
- Avoid becoming a part of the legitimate poetry community. The further in the dark you keep yourself, the better.
- Pay that reading fee. The higher the fee, the better your chance of winning the big money.
- If it sounds too good to be true then it MUST be true. Make this your personal mantra.
[...] 7 Great Ways to Become the Victim of a Poetry Contest Scam [...]
I would very much like to get my writing out there, and I agree with everything you have written here. However, I have found the online poetry and literature communities to be worthless. They are filled with haughty bores who are only interested in their own work, many of which have so deeply rooted themselves in the community they feel as though they own it. I have joined a few only to find out that the only thing most care about is what I think about their poetry. I didn’t join expecting to be discovered. I have been published already, but hardly “discovered.” But I did expect the participation to a two-way street.
I constantly get those annoying emails and letters sent to my home….
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In reply to john d’s comments I belong to a site called Tailcast.com where writers artists of all types and genres mix and comment on each others work, there are no cliques, although some split off to start little groups of more in depth analysis of each others work and challenge each other to write a piece on this or that. No winners or losers just good fun, with honest critisism. Why dont you have a look mate.
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Great post and quite humorous! It is sad how many of these “so-called” publishers play on people’s desires to be published.
I think what really gets me is that they are also targeting children now. My daughter posted one of her poems on a children’s website. The next thing we know she got a letter telling her that her poem had been selected to be in anthology and she would need to pay $50 in order to purchase a copy of the book if she agreed to let it be published. She was so excited. It broke my heart to have to tell her that it was a scam.
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