My first publication credit isn’t on LinkedIn.
In the early 1980s, middle school me found an ad in the back of a writing magazine for a poetry contest. The laddie reckoned himself a poet, so he (or his mom) ponied up an entry fee. Although I did not win a cash prize, I was awarded an honorable mention. The company compiled a book of the winners and honorable mentions and offered it for sale for an exhorbitant sum. When I got it, I found that it was 800 pages of honorable mention poems, a dozen or more per page. Some people opted (spent a little money) to include a dedication and/or a photo. The company also offered the chance to attend a conference to accept the award in person at something like $500 in 1980s money. This company was making money hand over fist. Legally, but squickily. The whole business model was built on extracting money from trusting aspiring poets out there who did not know the whole story about the publisher they were dealing with–that the whole enterprise was not to sell books to poetry readers, but rather to extract money from the aspirants.
Fast forward forty years and look at the business models of many companies, especially on the Internet. Are they built to help the users solve their problems, or are they designed to extract as much money from the users as they can and/or selling the users’ information to anyone who’ll pay for it? Legal, but squicky.
Which is one of the reasons I’m still “between contracts”–there are some kinds of jobs to which I won’t apply. Unfortunately, they post a lot of jobs.
For more on World of Poetry Press, the guys behind my first published poem, see this article from 1989.
Also, note the poem is kinda timely for Independence Day. Although “Standing alone since 1776/never once in a fix” shows the depths of 1970s and early 1980s elementary school history lessons. Or what an eleven-year-old will do for an end rhyme.
