Writers Beware

Oh dear writers, guard yourselves carefully.

The other night, I was searching through calls for poetry anthologies. I was wandering around on google, checking Poets & Writers and Newpages.com--good for running across new ideas, though never on these sites have I found journals that pay.

Which is wrong.

But that's an old story, so we'll move on from the importance of writers and poets being paid for their art (and not accepting anything else) to something far worse. It was late, and I was wandering aimlessly, when I found a call from Savant Publications that stopped me still. I actually said aloud, "This is evil." I quote from their "call for submissions" page:

"There is no submission fee. No complementary copies will be issued. Instead, poets agree by submitting one or more poems to purchase ten (10) copies of the anthology at half-off the suggested retail price if any one or more of their poems are accepted for publication."

X 

(Insert buzzer sound here.) Writers, beware. You should NEVER submit your work anywhere that requires you to pay for the privilege of being published. (I'm not talking about reading fees, which have become more common among literary journals.) Offering you a discount on books is normal. Requiring you to buy any given number of books is wrong. 

You know what this says? They have no marketing plan and no money for one. Their grand marketing plan, I would imagine, is to cram as many poets as they can onto those pages and expect them alone to generate sales by, I don't know, giving it to their grandmothers. 

Your grandmother is no doubt lovely, but she is not a marketing plan. Dear writers, please avoid.