Snippets and Fragments: Preditors & Editors
Editors -- August 3, 2009
Those writers who have been lurking around the Internet for a long time may already know about Preditors & Editors. (The misspelling of the first word of their name is intentional.) If you haven't discovered this site and are interested separating the competent from the incompetent, and the honest from the scam artists, you might want to bookmark their page and see how your potential agent, publisher, freelance editor, or other literary professional measures up.
The site Preditors & Editors has been around for more than a decade, almost forever in Internet terms. They offer unvarnished opinions on people and institutions connected with the business of writing and publishing.
A sampling of categories covered by Preditors & Editors includes Agents, Attorneys, Awards, Book Publishers, Book Stores, Contest, Conventions, Software, Magazines, Organizations, and many more. The P&E site implies that they get much of their material directly from the experience of their readers, but the Ink Byte Editors were not able to determine how to contact the site's operators: we could find no email address, contact form, etc. on their site... perhaps an oversight on our part.
The reviews are very frank, apparently uncensored, but reading a few raises some questions in the skeptical reader's mind about how much verification goes on. Our advice, would be to use P&E as one of your sources when performing your "due diligence" on someone you may do business with, but don't depend on any single source to the exclusion of others.
According to the P&E home page, someone, presumably a very unhappy agent has taken strenuous exception to the opinions expressed, going as far as filing a lawsuit against the site. They are soliciting donations to defend themselves.