Young Writers con

ailuro2

Tis a shame they're aiming it at kids. :-(

thunderbird

I have had a letter from Young Writers this morning advising me that my son's poem was to be published (he is 12).
I was aware that he had written a poem and it had been entered into a competition, as his whole class (or maybe even year) were doing it. I had read it and thought it was excellent, so I was really excited and proud when I read the letter and saw the certificate for him.

As he is off school feeling poorly today I went straight to show him and tell him about it and he was equally chuffed and was reading the letter carefully as he knew there were kindle prizes available to winners and thought he could be getting one.

I came online to look up the company website to see what the prizes are and to see if he was mentioned on their website and my search brought up this thread and other similar ones.

I am gutted, I feel so upset for him. He is not the most confident child and thinking that he had won had really given him a boost.

I have emailed the school about this, if they were aware of how this company operates and chose not to tell parents then I am disgusted. If they didn't know, then I hope they never have anything more to do with them.

VictorMeldew

We have just received one of these letters from my daughter's school saying her work Monster Poetry is to be published in a book. I became suspicious when I found out that it was £15 per copy of the book - if this was a real competition then the 'winner' should at least receive a free copy of the book. It makes me laugh that the overall winner wins a £10 book token! Not even enough to pay for the book itself!

I will be contacting the school and governors about this. I'm not happy with my daughters details being passed onto a third party without giving me chance to investigate them first. Hopefully if enough people do this the company will go bust.

Thought I'd just post this link again about the founder of the company....

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-1713641/Forward-Press-boss-arrested.html

And this one in the Guardian...

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2009/mar/21/young-writers-competition

Please also see the other links posted by Trumpton in post 38.

PS - my daughter has come home from Brownies - all her friends' work has been chosen as well - surprise surprise!!

jules-2005

Thought I'd bump this old thread as a letter and certificate landed on my doormat this morning from the young writers. Thought it was a scam straight away as the price of the book was a ridiculous £15.99 + £2 p&p.

After seeing many proud parents from my daughters class post pictures of their child's certificate, I've had to warn them

keyser666

yeah a couple of mates posted on facebook about their childs story getting in the April issue this year, had to tell them

samanthaknd

Wizbub wrote: »

Having returned home from a weekend away, we were delighted and filled with pride on opening a letter informing us that recently our daughters school (named in the letter) had submitted some of their pupils work for the, Young Writers' Mini Sagas competition and that our clever daughter's story had been selected for publication! (the stories being under 50 words)
It stated that she had infact beaten over 20,000 other stories from around the UK and Republic of Irland to be chosen and published.
Not only that but a copy of the book 'Tiny Treasures The British Isles' would be kept at the British Library and further libraries across the
UK. They told us that information had been sent to the school giving details of our daughters success and enclosed was a certificate and bookmark to mark her achievement!
We of course congratulated her and called up our relatives and friends.

Imagine her upset on returning to school only to find out that all children entered were to be published, her entire class infact.
We feel conned and miss lead, but most angry that our daughter and her friends have been so misslead.
The book costs £14.99 to purchase. Does anyone else believe this is a cruel money making scheme that targets children and their families using nieve schools to endorse it?
We still feel obligated to buy the book as all her friends parents are.
:mad:

Had the exact same letter for my son a few years ago and low and behold in CAPITALS he was selected out of (insert number here) pupils, and when returning to school after the weekend all pupils had them lol. I never bothered buying the book think it was £12 at the time.

jaylee3

This would not be so bad if

a) They were straight and upfront about what they are doing!

b) The book was say, seven pounds, and not fifteen!

EG, they could get the kids to write poems/short stories, and then ask schools to ask parents if they want to see their children's work published in a book.

It costs about £350 to publish a book, and about 2 pound a copy for each one to be printed up. So if 200 sets of parents, paid seven quid each for a book with the work of 200 children in (poems/short stories,) then the publishing company would get £1400. This would more than cover the £750 for the book to be printed, and for 200 copies for the parents. The company would make almost £700, and the parents would have a book full of their child's school's work, (including their child's.) They could even take some pics of each class, and print them in the book! It would be a nice keepsake.

But to con people into believing that their child has been carefully and specially selected is incredibly wrong. This actually happened with my friend, whose daughter got such a letter, and she told EVERYONE that her daughter was a published author, and she had won a competition, and that she was this amazing child prodigy. Imagine her shock and embarrassment, when she discovered all 90 kids in her daughter's school year also had their work published in the book!

It's a con, and it should be outlawed: unless, as I said, they were upfront and honest about what they were doing. I mean, I bet many parents would like to see their child's work in proper print, but these companies need to be honest
about it!

*disclaimer* the figures I quoted are not exact, but they give you an idea!

Baby_Angel

We had a letter too this week. My DD (8 years) is thrilled at the opportunity of her work being published. Then I read the letter fully when I had a quiet moment. The price of about £18 made me think twice and do the research. I couldn't find any one selling these books online. So I searched MSE. I thought of starting a thread, before I found this one. I am horrified to find this scam has been going on for years.

So as not to disappoint DD, we will hang up the certificate somewhere to show how proud we are. Pre MSE times I would have easily forked this money out. :eek::eek::eek:

I hope no one in the school has fallen for this scam.

kingfisherblue

My son has special needs and his poem was published in one of these books a couple of years ago. I was aware of the con (used to work in bookselling before the children were born, and even back then, there were similar cons). However, my son's best loved activities are reading and writing. I decided to purchase a copy of the book for him. Two years on, it is quite dog-eared from regular use. My son derives a great deal of joy from seeing his name, and those of his friends, in print, and he reads the poems over and over again. Most are poor quality poetry, but it tends to be simple enough language for my son to read without help (he has a reading age of around 7 years old).


So yes, it's a con, but some children do benefit from having a copy of the book. Not all are left to gather dust on the shelf.

Honey_Bear

I'm really surprised that this idea hasn't been adopted by schools to make money, rather than costing parents an arm and a leg.


If a class of 30 kids produce 30 poems, and each of the parents is willing to spend £15.99 on a book, plus £2.50 p&p, that's somewhere in the region of £550. Per class.


Local printers around here charge £30 to bind a student dissertation if you submit the work on a memory stick, so I would have thought that if any school wanted to raise a bit of money, an internal competition would result in some serious fundraising capability.


What I find really interesting is that the schools that parents are posting about on here appear to be sending the children's work off to an organisation that can at best be described as seriously iffy, together with the children's name and home address. Really? I'm not a parent but if I had a child and this happened to their information, I'd be reporting the school (teachers, head teacher and governors) to the local authority or Department of Education.


In addition to that, this seriously iffy company now appears to own the copyright of the children's work, which they obviously do if they're not paying royalties. Imagine how valuable that will be in 20 years time when, eventually, one of these kids becomes a writer of JK Rowling's stature, and before anyone laughs at that, given how common this scam obviously is, the laws of probability pretty much guarantee that sooner or later, they will hit gold.


Having thought about this for long enough to type this post, there's a part of me that now wants to set up a kid's publishing company because I know I could do this ethically and make a shedload of money out of it, for the kids, the schools and myself.