One person’s pleasure can be another’s poison.

This is especially so if the two persons are of different gender and the concoction is literature in its rawest state – an author’s submission to a literary agent or publishing house.

The archives of the Better Business Bureau contain a dispute between a would-be novelist from Eastern Canada and a literary agency in the West – a case that touches on a controversy over whether it is right to collect fees from authors to have their words immortalized in print.

When not tending his truck garden, Edgar P. Merriweather (not his real name) filled his time writing a novel about a housewife, Brittany – a “beautiful blond with a cheerleader-perfect body” whose friend Darlene had “a fast-lane body, lava-red hair and a perfect beachball bum.”

“Her spicy hormones are combined with coltish exuberance,” he wrote the agency in his story outline.

Merriweather was encouraged by the response he received. “I found the story and characters compelling,” replied literary agent “Kenneth Smith,” in a letter to Merriweather. “Indeed, more so than in most genre manuscripts that make their way through this office.”

The agency asked for, and received, a $500 reading-fee deposit. Later, Merriweather wrote: “I kinda tend to think you guys really are fixated and focused on reading fees.”

Agent “Lillian Frost” fired off a reply (Smith having left the agency’s employ). “My first impression is that this story and these characters are stereotypical and unoriginal,” she said, adding: “I don’t think this is a manuscript we would offer for submission.”

Merriweather contacted the Better Business Bureau. The BBB checked with the literary community and learned that the agency has a good reputation.

As Frost wrote the bureau: “Books are like films and art. Everyone reacts to them differently.”

Nonetheless, her agency refunded the $500.

What price, literary glory?

A growing number of literary agencies and publishers are charging writers reading, editing and marketing fees, a practice that traditionalists in the business are uncomfortable with. They believe they should be paid commissions only – an incentive to accept only work that has commercial or literary merit.

Though the business practices of literary agencies sometimes are challenged, BBBs more frequently receive inquiries – and sometimes complaints – about enterprises in the publishing end of the book business.

Some come from businesspeople who have received mail that reads something like: “Greetings, Ms. Pamela Pinchpenny, assistant comptroller, Chinook Pins and Fasteners: We are the Who’s Who of International Magnates, Potentates and Tycoons.

“We would be honoured to be permitted to include your name, company and biography in our annual directory.”

The fee? Check the fine print. These hustlers typically charge thousands of dollars for something that may not even be given any significant circulation.

Other BBB inquiries come from would-be fiction and non-fiction writers and troubadours, whether a CEO hawking his or her memoirs or a starving poet.

“Congratulations, Mr. Bartholomew Inkpen!” a publisher’s letter might say. “Your amusing collection, Biscuits, Beans and Cowboy Verse, is scheduled for publication in one of our finely bound hardcover editions.”

If the collection is the doggerel the title suggests, chances are that Inkpen received the response from a “vanity publisher” or a “subsidy publisher,” both of which – unlike the conventional “royalty” publisher – requires the author to pay all or part of the printing and binding costs.

Vanity publishers manufacture the book and cover their profit and overhead at the author’s expense. Subsidy publishers charge the author at least part of the cost of printing and binding, but often provide related services such as editing and distribution at their own expense.

One such publisher, International Library of Poetry, Owings Mills, Md., publishes hardbound anthologies that feature amateur poets. However, they are not distributed and cannot be found in bookstores. They are sent to those who pay about $50 US to have their work included.

The siren song of joint venture publishing companies is irresistible to authors dispirited by their growing piles of rejection slips from conventional publishers and agencies, and there are several recorded instances of book-publishing chicanery in North America.

In one case, Commonwealth Publications Inc., Edmonton, closed its doors in 1999 after American authors paid it thousands of dollars each over a period of several years. The company had been given an “unsatisfactory” rating by the BBB of Central and Northern Alberta after it ignored complaints.

Authors determined to go it alone are better off self-publishing. The author shoulders the entire cost of publication, but keeps control over the project’s design and costs.

If Ms. Pinchpenny were to decide to publish her bookkeeping memoirs, she could put the work out to tender on her own instead of buying a pre-set package of services at an inflated price.

(Brock Ketcham is the director of trade practices for the Better Business Bureau of Southern Alberta. He can be reached at brock@businessedge.ca)