Last month, Mitchell Gross, AKA Mitchell Graham pled guilty to conning his former girlfriend out of over 3 million dollars. He's also the author of a fantasy trilogy published by HarperCollins and a couple of legal thrillers published by Tor/Forge.
In 2002, he secured literary representation and his first book deal by publicizing his grand-prize win in something called the Delmont-Ross writing competition. In several interviews he claimed that he was contacted by 4 agents and 5 publishers the day the prize was announced.
The thing is, the Delmont-Ross contest is fake, as Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware have exhaustively established: http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2012/01/delmont-ross-writing-contest-saga-of.html
Writer Beware found fake press releases about the Delmont-Ross, and Graham placed announcements about his winning manuscript in legitimate SF/F genre publications. Graham actually hired well-known sci-fi author Ben Bova to judge the contest, and then gave Bova only one manuscript to consider for the prize.
These days, I can't imagine an author getting agents' attention with a fake contest. Most real contests don't impress even agents, lately in part because there's been such a proliferation of awards. But ten years ago, most agents didn't accept e-queries, information about how to query was not widely available, and contact information for agents often wasn't online, so it was a lot harder to submit. There was much less slush back then, and the quality was better than it is now, because the barriers to entry would have filtered out a lot of the crazy.
It's not at all difficult for me to imagine that an agent or editor's decision about a manuscript would be influenced by a belief that the book had been decisively chosen by a panel of judges in a contest with a significant prize and major corporate sponsors. I think this dude conned HarperCollins into publishing him.
In 2002, he secured literary representation and his first book deal by publicizing his grand-prize win in something called the Delmont-Ross writing competition. In several interviews he claimed that he was contacted by 4 agents and 5 publishers the day the prize was announced.
The thing is, the Delmont-Ross contest is fake, as Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware have exhaustively established: http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2012/01/delmont-ross-writing-contest-saga-of.html
Writer Beware found fake press releases about the Delmont-Ross, and Graham placed announcements about his winning manuscript in legitimate SF/F genre publications. Graham actually hired well-known sci-fi author Ben Bova to judge the contest, and then gave Bova only one manuscript to consider for the prize.
These days, I can't imagine an author getting agents' attention with a fake contest. Most real contests don't impress even agents, lately in part because there's been such a proliferation of awards. But ten years ago, most agents didn't accept e-queries, information about how to query was not widely available, and contact information for agents often wasn't online, so it was a lot harder to submit. There was much less slush back then, and the quality was better than it is now, because the barriers to entry would have filtered out a lot of the crazy.
It's not at all difficult for me to imagine that an agent or editor's decision about a manuscript would be influenced by a belief that the book had been decisively chosen by a panel of judges in a contest with a significant prize and major corporate sponsors. I think this dude conned HarperCollins into publishing him.