Re: Re:just making an opinion
Telling someone who's in pain that their suffering is trivial
never works. In my experience, people who say things like that tend to not have done a lot of suffering of their own. Try hanging out with crips, chronic illness cases, and people who've suffered severe abuse. They don't play one-upmanship games.
PublishorPerish, I'm sure it wasn't intentional. If you tell me so, I'll rejoice to hear it. But we're all writers here, so I'm giving you feedback: you sounded like you were doing a bit of a superiority dance.
Should people have checked out PA more carefully? Sure. It's always good to check things out in advance. I'm likewise sure that PA's victims have blamed themselves, over and over again, for not spotting PA's con games in advance. And of course PublishAmerica agrees with you on this point; "Obviously, you didn't read the contract carefully enough" is one of their basic riffs.
But you know what? Dee Power's not a naif. She had several books in print from real publishing houses before she ran afoul of PA. Canada James sells books for a living. Hedda Nussbaum worked for a major publisher for years. Something more than the the naive aspiring writer's proverbial willingness to be deceived is at work here.
Why Reading the Fine Print Isn't Enough:
I have seldom seen such artfully and deliberately misleading language as PublishAmerica uses in their contracts and public information documents. It's all very well to sit back and say the authors should have done more research so they'd know what they were getting into; but the fact is,
it's impossible to arrive at an accurate reading of PA's contracts and web pages if you assume they're acting in good faith. Only bitter experience can reveal to authors that PublishAmerica's definition of "available" amounts to "PA won't refuse outright to sell a copy of a book to someone who phones them long distance, with all the pertinent information and an approved credit card in hand, to place a prepaid special order."
PublishAmerica is no more about selling books to the general public than Amway is about selling them soap, and it obscures that fact for the same reason that Amway does: No one who understood the real setup would ever go into business with them.
Here's where the authors go astray: Printing isn't publishing. In a real trade publishing house, roughly half the total staff works in sales, marketing, advertising, promotion, and publicity. All the departments' schedules are driven by sales cycles and the needs of distributors. Of course, this will be wasted effort if editorial doesn't acquire good manuscripts and production doesn't turn them into good books; but equally, the books will be wasted if they aren't packaged, described, reviewed, and distributed -- in short, if they aren't properly labeled for what they are, and put where their readers can find them.
Much of this work is semi-invisible to people outside the industry. Like European explorers who had some notion that they could reach China by sailing west, but weren't aware that there was another whole continent in between, the general public knows that authors exist, and they're vaguely aware that editors and perhaps even typesetters exist; but they're unaware that anything intervenes between that point and the arrival of finished copies at their local bookstore.
This area of confusion is the basis for PublishAmerica's con games. They don't publish in the sense of making the book public, and they barely even print it. This is
hugely cheaper and easier than running a real publishing operation. The only problem is, it doesn't work. PA knows from the start that it isn't going to work, but they leave their authors to find that out the hard way.
Some specific deceptions:
They tell their authors their books will be available from the same distributors all the big, established publishers use. This is true. Ingram and Baker & Taylor, the two biggest distributors in the United States, will stock one or maybe two copies of a PA title, to save themselves the trouble of having to obtain a copy from PA in the unlikely event that someone special-orders it. You don't need PublishAmerica for that. Ingram will do the same for any book that has a functional ISBN.
They tell their authors that PA's books are sold in brick-and-mortar bookstores across the country. They don't mention that they're talking about a tiny number of books and a tiny number of stores, because the sole mechanism whereby their books get onto actual retail shelves is that the authors personally go out to their local bookstores and beg and plead with the managers to stock a couple of copies. They don't mention that any author could do the same at their own local bookstores, no matter who's listed as the publisher.
They say they'll help the author promote the book. They don't say they'll send out a perfunctory electronic press release unaccompanied by copies of the book, than which nothing could be more useless. They also don't mention things like their persistent refusal to send out review copies, even when it's a legit reviewer who's written to ask for a copy. They especially don't mention that they don't bother to do all that troublesome sales & marketing stuff. As with their promised bookstore distribution, the only people who actually put any work into promoting PublishAmerica's books are the authors.
They say, with brazen mendacity, that they're a traditional, conservative publishing house that makes its money selling its authors' books. No one who works in the real publishing industry would ever describe PA as traditional or conservative, and they'd find it a strain to describe PA as a publishing company. You know those cardboard mockup computers that furniture stores put into displays of office furniture? If you've worked in the industry, PA looks like a publishing company about as much as those cardboard mockups look like real computers.
Furthermore, almost all the money PA makes selling books comes from their authors and the authors' friends and relations. PublishAmerica says, emphatically and repeatedly, that they aren't a vanity publishing operation. That's true. They aren't. They're a vanity publishing operation that happens to also sell a tiny number of retail copies on the side. They have no sales force and no trade or ID distribution deals, and they give the general public no encouragement to buy their books.
They say that
"when you get published by PublishAmerica, you eliminate all the problems associated with self publishing a book." They don't mention that they expect their authors to do every scrap of work they'd do if they were self-publishing. What they
really don't mention is that since (1.) their books are sold on a non-returnable basis, (2.) they don't offer booksellers a standard discount, (3.) they insist on setting their cover prices higher than the market will accept, and (4.) their name is a hissing and a byword, being published under their imprint
will actually make it harder for their authors to distribute and market their books than it would be if the authors had printed and bound them in their own basements, or had them run off at at the copy shop down the street.
And then, when their authors realize that what they're getting is nothing like what they were led to expect, PublishAmerica sneers at them, and says they should have read the fine print more carefully.
To hell with that. Yes, I'll agree that some of their authors were imprudent. That doesn't get PublishAmerica off the hook. The primary reason their authors were deceived was because PA made every effort to deceive them.
Reasonable prudence will not protect you from out-and-out deceit. This is why failure to exercise due prudence just makes you liable, but fraud is a crime. And though some of their authors let themselves be more easily fooled, it nevertheless remains that PublishAmerica's intentions were every bit as bad in their case as they were in any other.
End of rant.
A few additional remarks:
As I said earlier, PublishAmerica is a vanity press that misrepresents itself as a normal commercial publishing company. The basis of this claim is that they will sell copies of their titles to the general public, though they give the public no encouragement to do so, and they don't make the transaction easy or convenient for them.
Think of bookselling as ice cream sold at the beach. Normal publishers and booksellers are like ice cream stands: they've got all their flavors right there where you can see them, clearly and attractively packaged, and they'll maybe even give you a sample to help you decide. You pay your money, they hand you your cone, everybody's happy.
PublishAmerica is like a guy who's nailed a few boards together to make a booth. There's no sign on the outside and no ice cream on the inside. He's reading the paper. You have to figure out on your own that he's selling ice cream, then interrupt his reading to ask him about it, at which point he'll silently push a hard-to-make-out list of flavors across the counter at you. If you then decide to buy an ice cream cone from him -- and they aren't cheap -- he'll give you a slip of paper you can carry to another guy back in the parking lot who's got a small ice chest in the trunk of his car. If that guy has run out, you'll just have to wait there in the parking lot while he goes to get more.
Under those circumstances, can you say that the ice cream in the parking lot is available for sale? Technically, it is. Realistically, it doesn't have a hope in hell of selling. And if you're an ice cream maker who's signed a seven-year exclusive contract with these guys on the understanding that they're going to do everything necessary to get your ice cream into the hands of the general public, you'd have a right to think you've been mistreated and deceived.
