Hi guys, I'm Don... try www.authorhouse.com they are a publishing company and they publish various genres of books including poems. Have your collection of poems put into your own book you designed. They allow you to have full control of your work and the process of getting it done. Don't put your work out in siber space where anyone can take it. AuthorHouse will also copyright your works for you and after publication when the process of the copyright is complete they revert the copyrights to you, go to their website and check out the services they offer. I used them to publish my book and I'm quite satified.

Ruth, thanks for posting this.

I guess you'd have to go to read the fine print, Mathilda. Usually when a publication accepts your poem for publication, they copyright it, but the copyright reverts to you after publication.

I have a question about poetry.com.

One friend of mine told me never to submit to the site because they can legally claim your poem as their own copyright. That your poem becomes theirs.

Is that true? What if you submitted a poem a long time ago (like when you were 15 and didn't know any better)?

I suspect you're right, Tara. But at least vanity publishing is a little more straightforward than the previous offers from Poetry.Com, where they "accepted" everyone's poems and printed them in a book marketed only to the people whose poems were in it.

Thanks for this thread, Ruth. It's an important topic and it's really great to see poets sharing this information.

Not at all, money is the bottom line

Do you think that's going to be a step up from their previous scam?

Looks like Poetry.com is owned by the self publishing company Lulu per WHOIS
Registrant:
DNS Admin
Lulu.com
860 Aviation Pkwy Ste 300
Morrisville NC 27560 US
hostmaster-dn@lulu.com

I'm sure many of you have run across the site, Poets.com, and the International Library of Poetry that went before it.

From About.com:For a long time, we thought of the International Library of Poetry and its online incarnation Poetry.com as massive scams, preying on the hopes of would-be poets by advertising big cash prizes, then accepting everything submitted to them as “high quality” work, and asking the poets to purchase the telephone-book-sized volumes containing their poetry at a high price.

Well it may have changed its spots, but is it the same leopard? Read more at

http://poetry.about.com/b/2009/04/21/has...