Eye have a science fiction story its poetry will Doubleday publish me?

Question

Please let them discover me and pay me lots of ROYALTIES?

eye am already electronically published on the WEB www.poetrypoem.com/charlax WITH a copywrite see eh????

Answer 1

First of all, Doubleday doesn't discover anyone. Most of their books are by established writers or writers who have been published somewhere. They don't take first books and they don't dabble in poetry.

Get yourself a Writers Market to see who will accept your stuff. Make sure you have it in the correct format when you submit. Be prepared to be patient. It can take up to two years to get a NO.

Answer 2

To add to the above answer, no major publisher will touch works already online. The internet is a plagiarists' playground and your copyright is only as good as the high priced lawyer you hire to defend it. Your work could have been stolen ten million times and you wouldn't even know it. Therefore, it is a major problem for publishers to consider such work. They would have to get their legal dept to work their tails off to determine the actual ownership of the piece. Secondly, the fact you already copyrighted shows them you are an amateur and not at all professional. The best way to protect your work is NOT to obtain a copyright and just keep it the heck off the 'net. You own the rights to the work the moment you write it. Obtaining a copyright and then sending the work to a publisher tells them you don't trust them and you are an amateur. A lot of agents get downright angry when they see that. They don't steal work. Believe me, they don't have to.

As the poster before me stated, major publishers (and by the way, Doubleday has sunk down pretty far on that list these days - it is NOT a top ten anymore!) don't bother with poetry. Go into your local Barnes and Noble and count how many books are on the poetry shelf. Not very many. If a publisher has to choose between a high body count Dean Koontz and a book of poetry, guess who wins - every time.

Still, Doubleday deals directly with agents and doesn't accept unsolicited work from authors. They have a slush room for that.

Poetry is published by smaller publishers who seek what is called "literary works". They are mostly done POD and you won't make very much in royalties - not unless you discover a way to bring poetry back to the forefront of American reading materials, and that is just not happening any time soon. I just don't see people's reading taste changing all that much. This is not Victorian England. Poetry volumes were big back then.

Pax- C