The Newer Never-Ending PublishAmerica / America Star Books Thread

wanda45451964 said:

i still got my last royalty check for 1.40. of course hey are acrewing you out of everything you make on Amazon.com and all of them. Make sure you pay attention those sites each week, you need to count everytime you see one leaving. it will say 8 new 6 used. something like that, all those used ones should be what you get paid for. but we dont.

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Wanda, I think it's been explained before that when people list a used copy for sale on Amazon, they may not actually have a copy of the book. If the price of the "used" copy is more than a few dollars, it's very likely that they don't have a copy. Instead, they've put up the sale offer at a very high price, assuming that if someone orders their "used" copy of the book, they can buy a new copy from the publisher, send it to the buyer, tell them it's a used copy in really good condition, and make a big profit. There are several outfits that do this with every title that ever gets assigned an ISBN.

And if a store says it has a certain number of books in stock, and then that number decreases, it may be because they returned some copies to the publisher as unwanted, rather than because they sold the copies. So trying to follow what Amazon has on its site is a waste of time.

wanda45451964 said:

in short you are saying that none of us will ever really know if we are being ripped off?

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Everyone who believed that PA was a commercial press and found out otherwise really knows they've been ripped off.

But with regards to whether your royalty payments match the actual number of copies sold -- no, authors can never know for sure if their publisher's accounting is 100% accurate. When authors suspect that something is grossly wrong, they can, at their own expense, initiate an audit into the publisher's accounting records, assuming that the right to do that is included in their contract.

I would expect that PublishAmerica has some degree of error in their accountancy, since no one is infallible. As to how large that degree of error is, I cannot guess. However, it seems unlikely that any individual author's royalty statements would contain mistakes of the magnitude worth pursuing; most PA authors only sell a handful of copies of their books, so accounting errors would be in the realm of tens of dollars, not thousands of dollars.

What I think most PA authors can assume is that they can make a pretty accurate guess as to how many copies they have sold, because they will personally know each person who bought the copies. PA books sell to the author, to the author's family, and the author's friends. Rarely to anyone else. So if you made a sale, you'd very likely know about it.

Yeah, but I beat you by two minutes, Pinkie, so I WIN!!!!! :-D

Colt, it's great that you've recognised PA's dishonesty before you wasted even more time and effort on them. It's sad that they scammed you, but you've come out of it stronger and wiser. We do talk about them a lot because we'd like to prevent people from being caught in their snares, and we really appreciate folks like you sharing their stories. It gives newcomers the opportunity to learn from your mistakes instead of having to make the mistakes themselves and learn the hard way.