I also entered this competition and received a letter saying I have been accepted for publication. I'm also not sure whether this is a genuine competition as I have heard of this sort of thing happening a lot. The book sounds very expensive also - £20 with p & p.

As I understand it, every poem that is submitted is published. So the books they publish will contain unjudged poems and yours will be one of them.

£20 per book, in my opinion, sounds over the top. I guess they hope that each poet buys several books for family and friends but that could be very expensive even if they offer a discount for buying several copies (though I have no idea if they do this).

They say £1 from each copy sold goes to charity.

The competition comes from what they judge to be the top 100 (50 adults, 50 under 18s) competing in a slam.

To me, apart from the eventual competition, this is an expensive form of vanity publishing.

If you want to be self-published there are much cheaper ways of doing it but, obviously, ultimately the decision is yours.

If you want to put an anthology together yourself, why not get together with other poets you feel an affinity with and produce your own. Not only cheaper than publishing solely your own poems but it means several of you will be selling them too, so probably a better return on your investment.

I hope this will be helpful in your decision making

I've 'been accepted' too - call me cynical but this all sounds very dodge; £18 plus p&p is expensive for vanity publishing. If everyone gets published then I could have written literally anything and it would have gone in. Someone has to win the competition, but if everyone (8000 entrants in 2010) buys a book at £18 then they make a mint, and you see none of the cash for your little piece of beauty...

Paul and RME Thornhill respectively could well be correct.

This sounds very much like 'vanity publishing'. And what I mean by that is; a situation where a publisher will publish all or most entries into a massive anthology for monetary gain over and above artistic values of any kind.

Vanity publishers usually try to ingratiate themselves amongst poets by making it sound as though poems are taken on merit. Naturally many people are taken in and order a copy of the book...to show friends or have a bit of pride in having something published.

It is this perfectly natural desire in poets that vanity publishers pray upon. People order the book at £18 a pop or whatever the value they set and they're quids in.

The poets usually receive books with very thin paper containing vast numbers of poems that are of variable quality.

Not saying this is 'vanity publishing', but I would say be careful as to what ANY publisher is asking of you. Ask what you get free or otherwise and ask what they expect of you. Ask how many pages/poems and poets will be in any book etc. Also ask what they have previously published and ask for their publishing credentials. You can then look online to see what you find in terms of anyone speaking good or bad things about such publishers/publications.

In short it is right to have a skeptical/questioning outlook.
If it all pans out and seems legitimate- then great.

Either way it does not harm to be skeptical and questioning.

Oh and one last thing;

A look into Poetry Rivals reveals a publisher listed as Bonacia Ltd. Bonacia Ltd are associated with forward press- they have published over a million poems since 1989.

Over and out.