We old skeptics live by the cliché, "aint no such thing as a free lunch." It's not that we believe no one does anything for nothing. We like to think that we do, but, in our own way, even we do not do what we do for nothing.

Experience and the advice of others before us has made us flinch reflexively when we see the word "free," makes us ask what they want from us. Getting an answer to this question can be easy, but sometimes requires a finely tuned skepticism.

The advice offered herein is for those who want to avoid paying more for their learning experience than it was worth. Take notice that this advice applies to literary agency scams as well as the more familiar warnings about publication scams. This other group, literary agents who offer representation for an up-front fee, should simply be shunned.

Legitimate literary agents work on commission, and do not as a rule take on poets. Some poets do engage agencies, but their agents' primary role in representing them is as booking agents for speaking engagements.

Beware of poetry contest scams

Think of contest scams as black holes in cyberspace, like this one: . There are many others out there, and they are all designed to draw you irresistibly in. The following will give an overview of the remainder of them.

Among the more insidious of these schemes are the "free" contest and publication schemes offered on Web sites that offer huge cash awards and online publication for nothing. Sometimes, these sites are actually owned and operated by the same hucksters, or they are connected at their bank accounts—and live on the bank accounts of the unsuspecting and easily flattered.

Invariably, people who submit to one of these sites will receive email or snail-mail responses from the sponsors of the Web site telling them how wonderful, how refreshingly unique, their talent is—that their talent has placed them in the final running for the grand prize! They usually follow this sycophantic appeal to their mark's vanity with a publication offer or merchandise.

Neither the publication nor merchandise offer are free. Nor do they offer to pay the poet or writer for the privilege of publishing their work. The people who are vain enough to buy the publication, which is often in the $50 + price range, keep the hucksters in business.

There are other scams hiding within the ethers of cyberspace too. There are the members.aol Web pages and other no-cost pages online with no other purpose than to sever you from the money you could instead spend to print and staple together your own chapbook. This is not to say that an elaborate, domain name Web site provides any guarantee of respectability.

Nor do the trappings of respectability necessarily guarantee unbiased judging. There is in fact significant evidence from foetry.com that several of the more prestigiouos competitions should be avoided.

But also be aware that not all contests are scams

Some contest offerings are not so much scams as schemes, like those of legitimate publishers with high reading fees and low pay-outs whose survival depends on the support of their published poets. And there are publishers who defray their expenses by selling their sample publications and subscriptions almost exclusively to the poets who submit their work to them.Whether these publishers have dot-com, dot-edu or dot-org Web addresses, they do not necessarily deserve to be lumped in with the scammers. Most come and go, live short lives, survive only briefly their ongoing struggle against market forces beyond their control. They also have a prize to offer that goes beyond what their competitions seem to offer—a place where someone other than you and your mother may one day read your poetry and know that it really is good poetry. They can be easily distinguished from the hucksters by the fact that the cost of their publications is usually less than one-quarter of those sold by hucksters. Moreover, they at least provide copies of their publication as payment for the right to publish a poem, or as a token of appreciation for the support provided by the poet who entered a contest.

Keep your eye on the prize

Do not take the admonition to keep your eyes on the prize too literally. The money and even publication are not the end-all of poetry competition. Much depends on who awards the prize and publishes you. The real prize in poetry competition is winning an award or being published by someone whose selection of your poetry will garner respect from others who take excellence in the art form seriously.

A poet who wants to earn recognition for their talent has few options other than to compete in contests and otherwise submit for publication. Many publishers have a "stable" of poets from whom they draw their material for publication, and will look at what an unknown writes only when it is submitted to a contest. This, in combination with being published by a publisher worhty of respect, is how poets earn the respect of poetry's consumers and other publishers. It rewards poets with the prize of assurance that they are masters of the art form, and may ultimately open other opportunities for reward.

Characteristics of scams

There are six significant characteristics of the least scrupulous operations that should raise your eyebrow:

1. They offer large monetary awards for nothing.
2. After you contact them, they flatter you, tell you that you deserve what they have to offer—publication in an anthology that will include your poem.
3. The anthology costs more than anyone whould pay for a volume of poems by a famous poet.
4. Some have nothing but their contest award to offer, and often offer it on a Web page that is not part of a Web site that they control, like members.tripod or members.aol.
5. Or they control a Web site that exists purely to promote the contest offer, like the ones in characteristics 1-3 above. These may, and usually do, have other useful resources on their site, but these things and everything else are intended to draw you in.
6. They provide no telephone number, physical address, or contact information for anyone connected with the operation.

Even so-called respectable . . .

. . . sources of information can lead you into a scam. Take this example of the carelessness with which Poets & Writers Magazine adds links to its "Resources" pages in example: Circle of Poets is likely even less respectable than the more well known scams. But what is the more curious is the fact that Poets & Writers Magazine left the link on their "Resources" page after the scam was reported to them. But that's not all, the site is finally off line, and it was still listed on the P&W Resources more than a year later!