Hello Jill,
Thank you for the opportunity to say 'Happy Fathers Day'.....
Poetry.com is a fraud publishing organization that features it's online writing contest. It literally accepts 100% of applicants as 'Semi-finalists' in their 'international poetry competition' and sends a letter to the poor victims. The letter is full of flattery saying that you are a wonderful poet and the 'sectional committee' or 'panel of judges' has decided your poetry is good enough to be published. They ask a 'modest' payment of $50 plus extra if you want your page on a page of it's own. Publishing only those who paid, 6000 poems per book at $50-$75 a poem with 60 books published a year is a lot of $$$$.
Flattered writers are quick to give them money and order a few copies of the book they were featured in. After some time a message saying their poetry was good enough to be read on a cd then asking you to go to some expensive winning writers convention and getting a silver cup comes in. It's all to leach more money from the ones that haven't found out they've been scammed. They were even featured on ABC's 20/20. You can read about that in this link HERE from windpub.com (see moreinfo page). They have been scamming people since 1996 and continue to do so! It's disgusting because the state they're in LETS the continue to operate, despite all the complaints. If you need more evidence just search "poetry.com Scam" on google search.
--Misconceptions-- Poetry.com does NOT publish your work if you do not pay for the book. Poetry.com publishes 50+ books a year and does NOT sell them anywhere other than to the victims of their scam.
--Don't believe me?-- Have some fun and enter the contest. Write a crude poem about jibberish. Words like poetry.com, "dot com", sucks, etc will cause you not to get the letter. If you already used your address in the last couple of months use a friends address. You can also add a DR or ST to indicate drive or street and it may catch it as a different address in the database.
The Con-vention Invitation The Con-vention Email #2 Personal account of Con-vention How much They EarnHowardE@poetry.com: You're featured in [[cheesy bookname here]]!Help Take them off the InternetPoetry.com Scam
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