pay to play, or the lucid moon rises again

Michael Grover put up an interesting tidbit on Outsider Writers (www.outsiderwriters.org) about his resentment concerning certain publishers who do not offer contributor copies, comparing them to the snivelling con artists over at Poetry.com. While that may be harsh, I think it's still a valid point.

Nelson Algren once said in an interview that the author assigns the dollar value to his output. If you write a really good story, you may say that you're not going to sell it for anything less than a hundred dollars. And then, either you become a hundred dollars richer, or the story languishes on your hard drive and no one reads it. Some folks can blame the marketability of the story for whether or not it sells, or the quality of the writing.

Now, writing poetry... It's a given no one here will likely ever see much money from penning verse. We try to give our poems away every day to a multitude of websites. It's the value we've assigned to our poetry and it's the value that society has assigned to poetry. We continue to write and submit to share our thoughts and feelings with others, we do it for the cheap pop of seeing our names on a search engine, and I suppose that's good enough.

So, submitting poetry to a print journal, an anthology, what have you. Is it too much to expect a contributor copy? It depends on the value you've assigned to your poem. I've given away hundreds of poems to websites, and I've submitted hundreds of poems to print journals. The websites offer the cheap pop of seeing your name on a search engine. The print journals should give contributor copies. That's the value I assign to my poetry. Some people are satisfied with getting their poetry in print. That's their value. Michael Grover wrote an article about the value he assigned to his poetry and got his ass handed to him by a few defensive people. Of course, there's the flipside of the coin. No one's making money from this (discounting poetry.com). Print journals rely on subscriptions to stay afloat. Thusly, if I enjoy a poetry journal, whether it publishes me or not, it would behoove me to subscribe to the magazine as it would be advantageous for everyone to support those who support us.