Boy am I naive

I was pretty bummed out yesterday. You see the three months are almost up. What three months you ask? Well, as some of you know, at the end of May I had sent off my short story to two children's publishers. The submission guidelines basically state that if I do not hear within 3 months, they are not interested.

You can see why I would be bummed out about this.

But the naivete? Well that's a longer story. I decided to keep looking for publishers etc and came across this site for literary agents that are interested in hooking up with authors that are getting started up and working with them until they get published. You submit some information about yourself and your story, they invite you to send them a sample and voila they decide you have what it takes and want to work with. This spanned over a week and a half and needless to say I was on pins and needles waiting to hear back.

First red flag, they like my work but it needs to be "professionally edited". Fair enough, could be true. I don't know. They will either refer me to someone or I could arrange for it to be edited myself. Blah blah blah.

Okay. This is where I stop being naive and decide to google it. Oh how I love Google. It comes in so handy like when you see that ad on t.v. for that miracle hair removal cream that promises to be painless. Yeah.. not so much.

So I google the site and am thinking okay, it pops up in the paid for advertising area of Google Links... it's looking legit. Cause what scammers would actually pay for those links. I dig a little further. Google Writer's Literary Agency Fraud or complaints and bam... it's on a writer's net watch list. This guy operates under several different names and it turns out he actually owns the other site that "professional edits" and has no records of ever having sold any books. This guy even has a page of photos from some alleged book fair.

Disappointed? You bet.

Then it occurs to me how naive I am that I actually think I would be able to sell a book this way. Duh. They don't say it's hard for nothing.

I am not only disappointed in this whole scenario but it's even broader than that. I am incredibly disappointed to realize just how much fraudulent crap there is online. Sure we get those emails and the get rich quick schemes but it just hit me how much of it really is fake. You can not trust anything you see or read on the web as being true. Absolutely nothing. And that's a sad statement about our world today.

I got to thinking about this after I watched the movie Knowing. In one scene people are beginning to panic and, of course, the looting and mayhem begins with the violence escalating till the end. Just once, ONCE, I'd like to see it portrayed that every one heard the bad news, paused and thought about it for a few minutes then began to work together in a kind and peaceful manner. To think that we as a society would actually rise above the social chaos that seems to define us nowadays.

Of course, if filmmakers did portray that as having happened, it would be deemed unrealistic and that's sad too.

I don't think I will give up but I think I will try and do a little more in person research than say internet research. I think I'll start at my local library.