Or is this a cynical moneyspinner?

[madhairday]

DD came home from school all excited with an envelope full of official looking letters from the Young Writers Society, and a certificate saying she had been entered into and won a competition for a 'mini saga' piece of writing.

All good, so far. A lovely certificate saying what she'd achieved. Great for her confidence.

On reading further into the letter we are told we need to write to them to verify her details and give permission for the piece to be included in a compilation book of these mini sagas.

And that we need to pay £15.99 for a copy of the book.

Not sure if our reaction (which we didn't show to dd, it was all well done etc to her) was OTT, we asked dd if she was the only one who won.

Turns out 'nearly everyone in my class' got one.

Slightly cynical? Or an easy way of getting £15.99 out of parents, including some who couldn't afford that?

Now, we will buy the book, because dd is all excited, and because we want to affirm her.

But should we kick up a fuss at the school about this particular strategy?

Unfortunately there are a lot of scams that target schools, and nearly all schools are depressingly dumb and gullible about them. From blatant rip offs like this to the appalling Samaritans Purse, it makes you wonder why there aren't more measures in place to see these muppets off.

Our school got hooked by Samaritans Purse too. I wrote to the head last year and was reassured that they will not be contributing to them this year (old head since retired but deputy head is now the new head). Will be interesting to see what he does.

I have been on the Lulu site and it says you can self publish for free. This is excellent news as The writers agent sells them for so much money. Now lets look closly at Lulu.com
When you start to choose the style of book you want ie. Perfect binding it moves onto the next page asking for a title and author. This is problem number one for you. Next it askes you if you want to make this book available on line with an ISBN number or for privet use for you only. This is ok but guessing if you want the ISBN number you will have to pay more. The price although it is FREE starts at 78pence per page. Now as you do not have permission to use the rest of the classes or schools work your book will consist of only one page. This making not a great book and to be honest the page would fall out of a perfect binding book!!! If you were lucky enough to get the permission from parents to use lulu well I think I shall let you do the math as you would need at least 30 pages to make the book worth while.

On the other hand I do know that this agent uses so many schools and you get multi work from all different schools over the UK. However Some companys do the same offer with the book being perfectly bound BUT only uses one book per school. Also this small company donates £1.00 per book sold to your school. Granted there will be lots of winners from the school if not all pupils would be winners but as a keep sake and as little price as £4.99 I think this is well worth it.