A Cautionary Tale

I had every intention of starting a blog once my poetry collection was taken. That was always the plan. I've been reading and occasionally commenting on other poets' blogs for a long while now, and once I even won the infamous caption contest on C. Dale Young's site. But for some reason, I marked actually getting my book taken as the launching point for something like this.

Like many other poets, I submitted my manuscript to many, many contests. At first, it didn't get much traction, but I kept on revising it and kept on sending it out, and at some point, it started to become a finalist. Which was sweet--the first few times. But it turned into something a little different once it started hitting the double digits. At last count, it reached the number 19.

19 times I was a finalist. Sometimes even first runner up. One time, I actually won the contest, but once my name was put with my ms., it was realized that I had gone to high school with the judge, and even though it was a blind read, and even though he had never read any of my poems, I was disqualified. Apologetically.

So you could say that I didn't have very good luck with this sort of thing.

This past February, I told my husband, who is also a poet, that if my manuscript hit the number 20, if it was a finalist one more time without winning anything, I was going to put it in a drawer and write porn under an assumed name. Later that day, I got the email that I had won! Tony Hoagland had chosen my manuscript, and it was going to be published, with a target release date of January '09.

You can imagine my joy. The muffled-because-my-toddler-is-asleep whoooping silent celebration. The not-so-muffled bottles of champagne later that night. The plans and motions and commotions of the past few months of editing, revising, finding cover art, getting the author photo taken, setting up readings and a website and then...

And then...

And then...

July 22nd, I was notified that my book award was "revoked" and that the press was no longer going to publish it. Even though we had a contract. Even though it was almost all the way done and ready to go to press.

Why?

First, let me tell you that this press has a history of unethical dealings with its authors. The only reason why I didn't know this is because last year's winner had to agree to a gag order as part of the settlement with the press. At their insistence, she is not allowed to tell her story, or warn other poets about what happened. So I submitted to a press that I NEVER would have submitted to if I had known.

Which is why I'm writing this post.

Anyway, back to my story. Everything was hunky dory with this press, though I was a little surprised and disappointed that I didn't get one single editorial suggestion from the editor and, in fact, that I had to do the majority of both my own editing as well as the editing for the book as a whole. At last count, I had found and corrected 32 errors--only 3 of which were mine. The other errors were ones made by the editor--jagged margins, dropped italics, misspelled words. But I didn't mind doing the editing. After all, this was my book, and I wanted it to be right.

Early on, the editor had asked me if I would hire (pay) her to design my personal website. At first, I thought sure, why not? It would streamline the whole process. But in June, as we discussed it and she showed me some mockups, I realized that she wasn't going to be able to do what I needed for her to do, so I told her I was going to go in a different direction and get someone else to do it. From that moment on, EVERYTHING changed. And got really, really contentious.

I guess that since this woman designs websites for a living, my choice offended her on some very deep level. And all of a sudden, everything became a power struggle.

My collection is a book-length poem in sections, and as such, there are no titles. The Table of Contents is just an Index of First Lines. And this was fine--until the website debacle happened. Then she decided that it was her right as an editor to assign titles to my poems. What?!?

She actually told me, in one of our exchanges over this, that I needed to stick with the contents of the book and let her and the other editor do their jobs, which included deciding what went in the Table of Contents. Hello? It's the table OF CONTENTS--as in, the contents that *I* wrote. Needless to say, we disagreed. Big time.

That standoff got resolved in my favor, and things were ready to go to press. Then she sent me a mockup of the cover. When I read the blurbs, I just about fell out. She had taken the eloquent and thoughtful words that serious authors like Naomi Shihab Nye, Major Jackson, and Rodney Jones had written and had mangled them--brutally. I mean, chopped up sentences, moving them around so that the subject and predicate no longer talked about the same things. Just butchered them. Without the permission of these authors.

Although I shouldn't have to remind an editor of this, I had to remind her that these were not her authors and that she did not have the right to change what they said so fundamentally without their consent or approval. In fact, since one of the blurb-ers had specifically said she did NOT want her work edited, this presented a real problem.

And the final power struggle began.

She came back and said, "Okay, we'll reinstate the full blurbs, but in exchange, we're taking your author photo off the book."

What?!?!

At this point, you might be thinking that it was a spatial issue, that the blurbs were so long that there wasn't any room for an author photo. No. That wasn't the case at all. In fact, there was enough room left over for the press to put on a five-sentence advertisement for themselves and for the book award for next year, including guidelines. On the back cover of a book!

Let me say at this point that the very last page of the book was already a FULL-PAGE ad for the book award, with a full list of the guidelines. So this five-sentence ad on the back cover was redundant at best and unprofessional to say the least. How many books of poetry do you own? Do *any* of them have ads and guidelines for the book contests on the back cover instead of an author photo?

I argued with them about it, always beginning each and every email with, "With all due respect," but to no avail. I made logical points--blurbs and an author photo are expected on the back cover of a book, but contest guidelines are not. An author photo provides an emotional point of connection and entry between author and audience. None of it worked. This wasn't about what was right, or about respecting the person who wrote the book. It was about power and bruised egos and control.

And when I asked for a compromise, when I said please, can you reduce the five-sentence ad to one or two sentences, or wrap the text around my author photo, I got a certified letter in the mail saying that my book award had been revoked because I wasn't fulfilling my "contractual obligations."

{Update: Because the contract was rendered void ab initio, its contents are not private, and I can clarify this: there were only three things that I as the author had to do according to the contract before the book came out: provide the text itself, my author photo, and my bio. I obviously did those things.}

But it gets even better.

The letter went on to say that even though they had "revoked" the book award and were not publishing the book, the publishing contract was still valid and in effect and that they owned the rights to my book in all its formats. In order for me to get my rights back, I had to repay them the $1000 prize money I had been given as well as give them the $200 they had spent acquiring the cover art for a book THEY were choosing not to publish.

In short, they were breaching the contract, refusing to publish my book, and holding the rights to my own work hostage.

Needless to say, I wasn't going to pay them one thin dime.

I hired a lawyer and told him straight up that I would pay him that $1200 but that I refused to give them any of it. He drafted a letter of demand detailing the ways in which they had broken the contract and giving them one week to sign a waiver relinquishing all claims to my work. If they didn't sign, we were going to move ahead with litigation against them. They signed--immediately. But it cost me almost all of the money that I had won just to keep the rights to my own book--a book, might I add, that was no closer to getting published now than it was a year ago, when I submitted to this contest.

And in the meantime, the day after they sent me this letter of revocation, they gave the award to the runner-up and erased all signs of me, and my book, off their website. Just like they did to last year's winner.

So there it is. A sordid tale, indeed. But unlike last year's winner, I wasn't forced to sign a gag order. And I'm telling my story far and wide, to anyone who'll listen, because the poetry world is small, and it's hard enough to get your work seen and taken seriously. Because it's supposed to work out if you're lucky enough to get that phone call and win that prize. Because poetry presses should be in this because they love poetry and want to produce quality books--not because they have issues and poetic insecurities of their own and need to feel validated and in control. I'm telling this story because once you sign a contract and give up your finalist position in other contests, you shouldn't have to start over at square one--all because an unethical press broke the law and its word.

And I'm telling you this because their new book award contest opens for submissions September 1st, and I want every poet out there who is considering sending their manuscripts to reconsider. Your work deserves to be seen and placed in a press with ethics and integrity. I know it's tempting to just blanket the market and hope for the best, but if you hit with this press, it could happen to you, too, as both of the last two contest winners had to enter into legal action against this press--and neither has a book to show for it.

The name of the press? Cider Press Review. Pass it on.