Publishing Scams

Well, it appears the unscrupulous folks at Narrative Magazine are at it again, as questions emerge over whether their recent "First Person Story Contest" was rigged. A contest you have to pay to enter won by a close friend of the editors. Nothing suspicious about that...

See also other reasons to give Narrative the finger.

Thanks to Andrea for the tip!

Over at Literary Rejections on Display, some commenters have discovered the real reason Narrative Magazine is so eager to pump up their fraudulent subscriber numbers: they sell their email list to spammers and junk mailers.

Let's be clear: Narrative Magazine is run by a bunch of scumbags. Do not patronize their website, "subscribe" or, god forbid, pay them to submit work. Avoid at all costs.

See also my original post Fuck Narrative Magazine

While I think it's important to note that Cordle and his crew of followers often make connections between poets on the foetry discussion forums that are so tenuous they aren't far from claiming that poetry publishing is controlled by the Rothschild family in conjunction with the Council on Foreign Relations, the Ancient Order of Free and Accepted Masons and the Trilateral Commission, what gets lost in the hubbub is the fact that they actually make a good point: poetry publishing is rife with cronyism, gladhanding and pettiness.

I've just noticed that in our rotating advertisments an ad for poetry.com's "amateur poetry contest" pops up.

I'm not saying that they're criminals or anything, but I think that anyone to whom that 10 grand looks enticing, a quick googling of the phrase "poetry.com vanity press" might be a good bit of due diligence to do.