Beware of Some Writing Contests!

In my quest to find writing contests for you to enter, I was searching the Web and came across a lot of fake contests. Mostly they were the kind where you send them money and never hear from them again. That is, of course, bad enough. Some, however, I find much more crushing to the soul of a writer. These are the ones where contest really appears legit with its massive Web site and 100s of poems written by many different authors. Some poems are terrible, but others are downright beautiful. As you read it, you wonder if this author would be the next Emily Dickenson.

About eight years ago, when I first started writing poems, I entered a poetry contest like that. I was told that my poems were wonderful, and they were posted immediately. What I found out pretty soon was that it was a poetry mill, where they churn out products to make you spend a lot of money buying your poem in book form or on a nice piece of framed paper so that you can show family and friends how legitimate you are now that you are published. I’m sure the Web site even hopes your family and friends will want to spend large quantities of money buying your poem in a leather-bound anthology with a thousand other suckers’ poems in there.

Please check over writing contests’ Web sites carefully before you submit. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if it is legitimate, especially when you are so excited about your writing and perhaps new to the game. Sometimes if you Google the name of the site, you’ll come up with blogs and other sites complaining about them. Look over the complaints to see if this really is a contest, you want to enter.

As for myself, I’ll continue to look for legitimate writing contests for you to enter, but please remember I’m human too!