>But Sammy the Snot Who Lives in Your Nose? Sure!

by Roger Sutton
May 16, 2007 | Filed in Articles & Opinion
>Publishers Weekly alerts us to the latest buy-an-agent scam; I love e-literary agent's sage analysis of the publishing market: "because this is a highly competitive business, we recommend that you take the time to run your manuscript through a spell check." If they wanted to tip us off that they were wolves after sheep, well, they just did.

But mind their strict guidelines: "Sorry, we don’t accept poetry or pornography." And whose pride, poets' or pornographers', do you think that hurts more?
Roger Sutton
Roger Sutton

Editor Emeritus Roger Sutton was editor in chief of The Horn Book, Inc., from 1996-2021. He was previously editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books and a children's and young adult librarian. He received his MA in library science from the University of Chicago in 1982 and a BA from Pitzer College in 1978.

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Roger Sutton

>Latawnya should have listened to her old Uncle Patch: "Nay! Nay! From strangers stay away!" (www.patchthepony.com). We had to peddle Patch's propaganda when I was a children's librarian a hundred years ago.

Posted : May 17, 2007 03:59

Laura Salas

>My (very legit and wonderful) agent wasn't able to get a higher advance from my (very legit and wonderful) publisher because it's my first picture book and, after all, "it's poetry." Ouch. And it isn't even porn poetry! Oh. Maybe that's the problem.

(Kidding! I'm kidding!)

Posted : May 17, 2007 03:56

Rachael

>Hey, sometimes these stories have happy endings - the nugget of (spell-checked) literary gold shines through the muck of the slush pile.

I fear that was not the case for Sylvia S. Gibson and her masterpiece, Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2457332

Posted : May 17, 2007 01:22

rindawriter

>The site is a copy editor's nightmare...eeh! That was sufficient proof to me that this is one scammy outfit...

Posted : May 16, 2007 11:26

Crumpet the Cranky Elf

>By taking a fee to post a work on his site, he is already joining the less-credible agencies. If he's going to take a cut of the work when he sells it to the publisher, is he saying he doesn't have enough faith that the work will sell, so he has to take money up front, too? That's like Curtis Brown asking for a fee upfront when they sign a new client because they have to pay their rent.

Posted : May 16, 2007 08:24

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