the Poetry kit

Publishing Scams and Other Ways to Lose Your Money

Poets, particularly those who are inexperienced, unpublished, and\or vain, are vulnerable to losing their money to unscrupulous operators. The two articles by Johnathon Clifford in the magazine section show some of the ways in which this can happen. They draw the sometimes vague line between acceptable vanity publishing and the outright publishing scam.

What are the main ingredients of a scam? All or most of the following must be present before an operation can be considered to be a fraudulent attempt to take money from the vulnerable:

The writer is asked to pay for publication.
Selection for publication is by willingness to pay, not by artistic merit (however badly judged).
The writer is encouraged to buy copies of the publication in which his/her work appears.
The 'publisher' makes no significant effort to market the products outside of the circle of participating writers.
The 'publisher' makes false claims about his marketing efforts and costs.

An area open to the scam which Johnathon does not mention is the writing course. Everyone with pretensions to be a writer will have seen advertisements of the type: 'Be a Writer' or your money back. There are many genuine courses around, some by Poetry Kit. But beware. Before parting with your money, especially for expensive correspondence courses, check:

Is the course content what you want, or will you have to work through writing forms that don't interest you, just to get at those that do?
Who are the tutors, and how well will you be able to communicate with them?
What are the 'money back' conditions? A common formula is 'if you are not published before completing the course'. But what do you have to do to complete the course? What if Assignment 20 is 'write a 26 part TV verse-drama on the theme of cannibalism'?

If you're out there with anything to say on this topic, get in touch. Within the limits of legal liability, we'll make of it what we can.