Free Poetry Contests

Free Poetry contests are a very common happening as of late. They are popping up all over the web, most with slogans like “Win $20,000” or “You can be the next winner.”

Now don’t get it wrong… some of these are quite great and can be useful to someone who just wants to have their name in a book, but the idea and how they go about this is a complete scheme.

The ways the winners are chosen have nothing to do with the “best poem.” It is a complete scam.

Sites like Poetry.com offer daily prizes as well, however they aren’t chosen truthfully. Well, to an extent. What they do, is select a certain number of poems randomly and then read them, and select the best poem out of those. They probably don’t even do that… but you get the point. They do not read ALL the poems. They read a very select few. As far as we know, they select a random poem as the winner and read it themselves and see if it totally doesn’t suck… and if it does they select another random one as the winner.

If you do not believe this article, try it out yourself.

Create a poem which totally sucks. Something like:

Poetry.com is full of them
They offer money and choose a winner
But the winner is not them
It is poetry.com

They never read the poems
And never select a real winner
This is all just a scam
And this poem is bad

So try this out yourself
And see who gets selected
To go to Washington
And get into their book

You will then see that they are a scam. They will soon send you a letter in the mail stating that your poem was great and that you were selected to receive a prize and want you to go to a convention in Washington.

They are not alone however. Most other “free” poetry contests are just the same. Poetry for America does the exact same thing as well as Amateur Poets of America. All are scams and should be avoided.

The best way to avoid these schemes is by looking at fine print and also only submitting to places which charges to read your poem. These are generally more legit. If you think about it, where are these contests getting the money from? Legit contests get money from the people who submit the poems while the scams receive money for telling all the authors that their work is great and they want them to pay $2 to have their poem in the book and tell them that the book is on sale for a “low” price just for them!

So please, avoid the scams and do what’s right. Tell others and spread the word. Do not let others be deceived by their money making schemes.