On the long bike ride adventure I took last week to San Pedro and specifically after my crash, I felt like just seeing a few things and turning around to head home. Like I mentioned, my motivation was sapped. As I checked out something calling itself an "Antique Mall" (something they have with a strange regularity down here) (I looked over their cameras, chairs, dressers and books) I dabbed my now pouring sweat. I start sweating once I get off a bike. I was still bleeding, and quickly left the establishment. I noticed a sign attached to a store as I was unlocking my bike. It proclaimed the store (name escapes me) as the oldest continuously operating bookstore in the Southland. I took it as a sign, stopped unlocking my bike, and went inside.
It was a haggard collection of new releases of the sort you see at airport bookstores, magazines, local writers, nearly outdated comic books, and a display shelf of poorly-constructed looking paperbacks by authors I'd never heard of.
There have been visits by me to local indie record and book shops where I learn about new authors and publishing houses, places that are reputable publishers that may take unsolicited material. I'm not quite ready, as a writer, to have things ready for an agent, but I like to do fleeting research with publishers who publish things I think my closest material to being done most closely resembles.
Those visits have given me names of operations to look up later when I leave those establishments. Same thing here in San Pedro, with that collection of poorly-constructed looking paperbacks, a construction quality level that maybe should have tipped me.
The name of the publisher on the binding and inside each book was Publish America. When I got home, I looked up the company's website. It all sounded quite unreal. They are not a POD (print-on-demand) or vanity press. They make money the old-fashioned way--by selling your books. They don't charge their writers a fee, they send them checks. They pay advances once the manuscript has been accepted and the contract offer has been signed and returned.
Sitting in our new chair at the computer desk in our apartment I stared at my computer screen puzzled. This was an incredible set of statements. It seemed far too good to be true. They had editors who'd pour over your work line by line, at no cost to you. If I had material farther along, and had been striking out with agents and unsolicited material accepting houses, I might've been tempted to rush off and get something ready to send. Like I said, I'm not that close, and I haven't exhausted traditional avenues to getting noticed, so I decided to a bit of research. The catch had to be something...
I started by simply typing "publish america" into my Internet browser's Google search window, and without hitting "Enter" I examined all the choices it generates for you. "Publish america scams" was something like second on the list.
It didn't take long to find out that the way Publish America operates is like a sinister vanity press. According to the horror stories of authors who are unsatisfied with their treatment by PA, you're obligated to purchase a certain amount of copies for promotional purposes, they do not accept returns, they charge prices for books that are far too high, they claim to sell their writer's books in "brick and mortar" bookstores, which is true in the sense that a customer can walk in and have it ordered special ("selling in a bookstore" and "shelving it in a bookstore" aren't the same thing) but even then they've been known to rarely complete sales or transactions. They even have a difficult time producing reliable sales accounts for authors of their books. When you find a bookstore, like I had, that shelved Publish America books, you must be in a place that's either sympathetic to a specific writer, ignorant to the system, or run by PA writers themselves; most traditional bookstores don't stock any POD, vanity, or PA books.
A company that proclaims that they discover authors and give them their first chance, give their material the opportunity it deserves, they seem, in actuality, to hustle the writer and their family to purchase copies of their own book to recoup the costs associated with printing it. Most reputable publishers and literary agencies don't consider a PA published book a writing credit. Worst of all, they own your story and characters for seven years.
The amounts of things that have been published by Publish America that are heavy with obvious typos called into question their editing staff's credentials. A claim made by them on their site, that they turn down 80% of all manuscripts also came under fire when an already published writer, on an experiment, wrote thirty pages of material, changed the name of the protagonist on page twenty-two, then photocopied the last ten pages over and over again until his manuscript was 120 pages long.
He was offered a contract.
After Publish America made disparaging claims about science fiction books and writers, like the gentleman who made them look foolish with the book from above, a group of published sci-fi writers got together and decided to have some fun. The ringleader picked a few names and sent them to everybody in their cabal. Everyone was to write a separate chapter using the names, and they were to commit every young-writer mistake in the book--overwriting, tense mistakes, self-reference, you name it. They were also told not to communicate with each other, so each chapter would be from a different genre and style.
Once they got everything together, the randomly drew numbers from a hat to decide the order in which this mish-mash of garbage would go. Chapter 21 was left as eight blank pages because one writer wasn't on time with their submission. Chapter 12 occurs twice; chapters 4 and 13 are word-for-word copies of each other; they even used a computer program to jumble words and use punctuation to mimic written English, but in reality, reads like garbled gibberish. The characters change sexes and races without explanation.
This is almost like the Plan 9 from Outer Space of books, only it's deliberate. It's called Atlanta Nights.
Publish America accepted it and sent out the form letter saying as much. The hoax became apparent and in the news, and PA repudiated their acceptance the novel, trying to save face and keep up the image of their "traditional publisher" status.
The writers had such a good time with Atlanta Nights that decided to sell it, but from a vanity press, from where it deserves to be published. Here's a link to it if, like me, you're curious to see how bad really bad can be. I hear it's good for young writers, highlighting all the things that are mistakes, and helping them to vet their own material.
I've yet to purchase a copy, but I'm thinking about it.
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