Re: Actually. . .
Absolutely, Mac. Look how many people get married without running a check on their sweetie's finances, legal history, marital status, odd hobbies, and other essential issues.
If signing with PA is a big step, marriage is a bigger one, full of catastrophic possibilities for the unwary. And yet, when it turns out that someone's promising new spouse has a long history of battering his girlfriends and the two previous wives he'd never mentioned, or is a grifter who's left a trail of kited checks, stolen credit cards, and plundered employers in the last four cities where she's lived, we don't tell their confused and grieving partner that it's all their fault for not finding it out in advance. We certainly don't mock them for being so deluded as to believe that anyone worthwhile could have wanted to marry them.
To carry the analogy further, PA isn't the equivalent of a guy with too many tattoos, too few teeth, and a string of odd friends who turn up at odd hours -- the kind whose past any reasonably prudent woman would investigate before marrying him. PA is the guy with good manners, capped teeth, a nice suit, and a habit of ingratiating himself with young women who've just inherited real estate or received a fat insurance settlement. F*ckups and losers are easy to spot. Professional con artists aren't. That's why they're professionals. And that's PA, which presents itself as a successful, squeaky clean, public-spirited enterprise.
Ol' Nameless here says
I'd challenge you to have any high schooler do a search using Google, Yahoo, or even AOL's cheap search engine for PA and see what they get.
I used Google, the best and most popular search engine going, and "publish america" as my search string. The entire first page of hits consisted of jolly PA promo. The first blip of negative information, on the second page, is
Caveat Scrivener at Speculations, which leads to a lengthy ongoing discussion. The currently topmost post might or might not say anything useful. Then there's some more jolly PA promo. Then you hit the
VOY Forum, with some few bits of negative information.
The second item on page three of the Google results is an interview at
Fiction Forum that so completely fails to be hard-hitting thit might as well be a paid advertisement for PA. A little further down that page you find
ABCtales, with more PA disinformation. The second to last hit on the third page, finally, is a
writers.net discussion of PA that has a big post from Dee Power in it. That's where you really start to find out about PublishAmerica.
If this were a high-school assignment, would the students get that far? Don't kid yourself. They'd have to have waded through site after site that represented PA as a legit publishing company. The fifth or sixth or twelfth time they saw the same results, they'd have figured they had their answer, and quit looking.
One reason for this is that PublishAmerica gives a "free website" to all their authors. However, those sites aren't controlled by the authors. They can't update them. They have to submit updates to PA -- which won't post negative information. What you tend to get are the excited early testimonials of authors waiting for their books to come out, and their first few experiences once they're published. Later experiences aren't reported. This gives a very good impression of PA. It also chokes the Googlestream.
Easy to research? Malarkey. This one requires an experienced, cynical old researcher with a lot of time and some idea of what they're looking for. So why would Nameless and SimonSays even suggest that this information is easily found? I'd say there's some possibility that it's because Dee Power is taking serious legal action against PA. Before, PA's big talking point was that they're a real publishing company. Now they're arguing that it was careless and stupid of their authors to believe their misrepresentations. It's a move to limit their own liability. If the authors failed to display a reasonable degree of common sense, good judgement, and prudence, PublishAmerica is less at fault for having cold-heartedly and deliberately scammed them.
I'd say "nice try", Nameless and Simon, but it wasn't.