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Publishers Advocate Award

Mac H.

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Hi Wexfordpress !

Sorry if you misunderstood. The criticism of the award and the people promoting it comes from several areas:

* The Author wrote a book which strongly advocated applying for a 'Publishers Advocate Award'.
The Author did NOT disclose her connection with this award.

* The 'Publishers Advocate Award' is meaningless to the bookbuying public/bookshops etc.
Even the author agreed with this - by pointing out that it has had never been awarded!
Thus the author's suggestion that people apply for this award is clearly poor advice. Misguided optimism if you will. But certainly bad advice.

* The Author has other statements in her articles that are not simply bad advice, they are factually wrong.
(See HapiSofi's post for the full info)

And my own contribution:

*The Author's webpage claims that she is the author of ten bestselling books including 'the forthcoming title Expertizing: Position Yourself as a Name Brand'
How can it be a bestseller, when it is a 'forthcoming title' ???

I suspect that the author simply labels any book she self-publishes as a 'Best Seller'. If not, then could you give a hint at what comparison is used?

(eg: A search for 'Self Publishing' books on Amazon gives 766 hits. Which of those would you consider to be 'bestsellers' in this area ?)

Mac
 

Lauri B

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Wexfordpress said:
Please don't let the facts get in your way. The award was to be judged by Jim Cox, a very respected member of the self-publishing/small publishing community. It would have had the same legitimacy as the IPPYs or the Franklins.
This whole thread has been based on a lie, that you just had to pay $50 to get an award. That was never the deal. You had to win it in competition with others. That is how all legiitimate awards work.

So have fun kiddies, but be aware that you are slandering a hard working author, coach and sometime self-publisher. She and some others had a dream. It didn't work out. No one except possibly Fern herself lost any money. No awards were ever granted.

So I repeat, if you are looking for an agent and don't have her book at hand you are doing things the hard, and possibly the dangerous, way. If someone has a better book to recommend please post the details.

John Culleton

Hi John,
Here's the quote my author forwarded me from the book:
“Send your galley or printed book to PAA, P.O. Box 590239, Newton, MA 02459. You’ll be notified as soon as your book has been evaluated. Include an additional $10 processing fee (and mark the package “Rush!”) if you need to be notified in 10 days. If you meet the criteria—a professional cover including ISBN and bar code (if you’re not sending a finished book include the name and email address of your cover artist), nice interior, carefully editing manuscript and good treatment of subject—you will be a recipient of a Publishers Advocate Award.”

What I objected to was the way The Publishing Game didn't disclose that the PAA award was conceived and administered by the author of The Publishing Game. And the idea that if a submitting author pays extra they can learn if they've "won" in a week or less really undercuts any appearance of legitimacy.
If this was a good idea, which I don't think it was, it wasn't presented very well. And since Ms. Reiss has already come on the forum and said she took it out of subsequent printings of her book, it's pretty much a moot point, anyway.
 

FernReiss

clarification

Hi again,
I'm really not interested in spending a lot of time defending this award, since it was never given out, and the organization (which never really got going) is defunct. However, just in the interest of clarifying incorrect statements:

"The Author wrote a book which strongly advocated applying for a 'Publishers Advocate Award'. The Author did NOT disclose her connection with this award."

Umm, actually untrue. The award was only mentioned in the first printing of my book, "The Publishing Game: Bestseller in 30 Days" (the organization was still mentioned in the second printing, but not the award; by the third printing, neither the award nor the organization were mentioned) and my association with it was disclosed. (The website--though no mention of the award, which as I said we canned--is still up--in the hope that someday someone else will decide they want to run it, but I should probably just take the whole thing down, it's been a couple of years and no takers.)

"The 'Publishers Advocate Award' is meaningless to the bookbuying public/bookshops etc. Even the author agreed with this - by pointing out that it has had never been awarded! Thus the author's suggestion that people apply for this award is clearly poor advice. Misguided optimism if you will. But certainly bad advice."
Yup, I agree. Was never awarded. (When I recommended that people apply for it, I'd hoped it would become a viable awards program, similar to BookSense, etc. But it never did. Since only three people ever applied for the award, and since I returned all three checks, I'm not sure what harm was done, but it certainly never took off the way we'd hoped.)

"The Author has other statements in her articles that are not simply bad advice, they are factually wrong. (See HapiSofi's post for the full info)"
Let's discuss this in another thread; I'm happy to discuss them, but I think we're muddying this thread. (As long as it's not another conversation about why I don't recommend POD publishing for most people, anything but that!)

"The Author's webpage claims that she is the author of ten bestselling books including 'the forthcoming title Expertizing: Position Yourself as a Name Brand' How can it be a bestseller, when it is a 'forthcoming title' ???"
Right. (Do you guys really want to hear all these details?) My first book (traditionally published) was certainly not a bestseller. Both "Infertility Diet" and "Terrorism and Kids" were small press bestsellers ("Infertility Diet" still is; "Terrorism and Kids" was right after 9/11, but no longer is, it's only minimally in print at this point); "The Publishing Game" books are all Writer's Digest Book Club bestsellers, or at least, that's what the bookclub folk tell me; they're amongst only a few books that have been consistently reordered. "Expertizing" is forthcoming.

"(eg: A search for 'Self Publishing' books on Amazon gives 766 hits. Which of those would you consider to be 'bestsellers' in this area ?)" If you're talking about books *about* self-publishing, there are probably only three bestsellers: Dan Poynter, Marilyn and Tom Ross, and, umm, me. (If you're talking about books that also get into marketing/book promotion topics, there are more-and there are more on the topic of literary agents, too.)

Also, they're not necessarily all bestsellers on Amazon--my books, for example, have always sold much better through Baker & Taylor than either Ingram or Amazon; not sure why. But I agree, 'bestselling' is a murky word that is becoming more and more used: Amazon alone now has several dozen (maybe more by now) categories of book, and if you zoom to the top 50 in any of those many categories, you can call yourself a 'bestselling' Amazon author. (A lot of people are making a lot of money now selling authors the secret of how you do this-which basically involves offering good bonuses if a lot of people go to Amazon and all purchase the book on one particular day. 'Bestselling'? Yes. But only for one day.

Anyway, hope that clarifies things. The award was never awarded, no money was ever collected, the organization is defunct. In retrospect, the awards part was not very well thought out, and though the rest of it was a good idea, nobody really had the time or energy to get it going properly. Anyway.

Best,
/Fern

http://www.PublishingGame.com
http://www.Expertizing.com
 

DaveKuzminski

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FernReiss said:
Since only three people ever applied for the award, and since I returned all three checks, I'm not sure what harm was done, but it certainly never took off the way we'd hoped

The award was never awarded, no money was ever collected, the organization is defunct. In retrospect, the awards part was not very well thought out, and though the rest of it was a good idea, nobody really had the time or energy to get it going properly.

Fern, don't contradict yourself. Money was collected, but it was returned. Then you claim no money was collected. Statements like that can only harm you.

In fact, this whole response of yours causes more damage to you than it would if you just shut down the page in question and let it slide past into oblivion since you've already admitted that it wasn't well thought out. No one was criticizing you personally. We're still not. We're cricitizing the award idea.
 

CaoPaux

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Wexfordpress said:
Please don't let the facts get in your way. The award was to be judged by Jim Cox, a very respected member of the self-publishing/small publishing community. It would have had the same legitimacy as the IPPYs or the Franklins.
So...the IPPYs and the Franklins are received on basis of payment and standards set deliberately low so as to put a Award sticker on as many books as possible in hopes of attracting an agent's attention to a book otherwise not commercially viable? And the esteemed Jim Cox would endorse such a project? Do you realize what light you are casting on self-publishing and the icons thereof?
 

book_maven

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Please don't let the facts get in your way. The award ... would have had the same legitimacy as the IPPYs or the Franklins.

Wexfordpress, you are VERY wrong about the Benjamin Franklin Awards. Jan Nathan and Publishers Marketing Association have worked very hard over many years to achieve legitimacy. As one of their longtime judges, I can attest to the integrity of this awards contest. Be careful in speaking of that which you do not know.