The New Never-Ending PublishAmerica Thread (NEPAT)

janetbellinger · Feb 5, 2006

Publish America

Dear Mo and Beth
Thanks for the advice.
Janet

eqb · Feb 5, 2006

Sigh. Why do I feel that PA has suckered yet another victim?

James D. Macdonald · Feb 5, 2006

Beth Bernobich said:
Sigh. Why do I feel that PA has suckered yet another victim?

Because they sucker forty to eighty new folks a day, every day. Nothing unusual.

Some folks just need to see for themselves.

Sheryl Nantus · Feb 5, 2006

Beth Bernobich said:
Sigh. Why do I feel that PA has suckered yet another victim?

because they have.

PA's primary market isn't and never will be the general public - it's always the authors who will spend money purchasing their own books and trying to resell them to the public.

PA encourages this with the constant repetition of the conspiracy theory - that somehow there's no need for new writers by publishers and that it's a closed shop. Of course it only takes a few minutes surfing the Net to find new writers being signed by agents and publishers almost daily in a variety of genres. To say nothing of e-pubs and small presses expanding to include more and more new writers.

PA sells books to the author at a grossly inflated price to boot, paying little in royalties (that is, if they pay) and then tossing the authors aside once the money dries up. Then the PA author sits there with boxes of books and wonders about where he/she went wrong.

in about a month we'll have a new influx of PA authors realizing, as they look at their pitiful (and usually incorrect) royalty check that they've been taken and taken good.

PA has already been taken to court and lost against TWO of their own writers who were ripped off for royalty checks. They lost another lawsuit against Encylopedia Britannica. How anyone sees them as a legitimate company is beyond me.

*shrugs*

MMo · Feb 5, 2006

Sheryl Nantus said:
PA encourages this with the constant repetition of the conspiracy theory - that somehow there's no need for new writers by publishers and that it's a closed shop. Of course it only takes a few minutes surfing the Net to find new writers being signed by agents and publishers almost daily in a variety of genres. To say nothing of e-pubs and small presses expanding to include more and more new writers.

I belong to two publisher-specific e-lists for authors published by those publishers. The lists were organized by the authors, not the publishers. Contrary to PA's claim that publishers have no need for new writers, in the past week those two lists alone welcomed four new authors who had each sold their first book last week.

Mo

SC Harrison · Feb 5, 2006

janetbellinger said:
but I will perhaps foolishly, go ahead with my dream. P A - full steam ahead. Or, as Paulo Coelho puts it in his introduction to The Alchemist, "But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here." For me, it is not about cynicism. Perhaps I will be proven wrong.

Janet Bellinger
Teacher on the Run
Rain
Silver Sighs

Janet, you can believe in it as strongly as you want to, and you can work at it as hard as possible, but that won't convince a bookstore owner to lose money on your book. If you think you can realize your dream by selling books out of your trunk, I wish you the best of luck.

AmandaPA · Feb 5, 2006

Sheryl Nantus said:
PA sells books to the author at a grossly inflated price to boot, paying little in royalties (that is, if they pay) and then tossing the authors aside once the money dries up. Then the PA author sits there with boxes of books and wonders about where he/she went wrong.

I agree with this statement, but when it comes to being tossed aside, that can also happen with commercial publishers. They will sometimes do a run of around 3000 books, do very little or no promotion and then put the title on backlist to gather dust so to speak. I know because it happened to me. I received a $2,500 advance though, unlike the $1.00 that I received from PA.

Tilda · Feb 5, 2006

janetbellinger said:
Writing workshops, for example, typically cost in the neighbourhood of $400-$500 for a 3 or 4 day course. In critique groups or writing circles, you are dealing with amateurs who may know no more or even less about writing than you do yourself. Professional editing costs between $500-$600 (I checked) in Canada. Every where you turn, there are services offered to help writers improve their craft, all at a fee, of course.

I'm an unpublished author, who hasn't put a penny in editing services or workshops, and I know my text is very close to being publishable at the current editing stage (the editing alone has taken some 6 months now). The only investments I've made have been some books, one of which I heartily recommend to you and any PA author: Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne & Dave King.
You don't have to pay for editing. The editing your editor will do at the real publishing house is all you need, the rest you must do yourself. There are plenty of free tools around, for example online. By the way, I've probably learned the most critiquing other people's texts ("hmm...a lot of these writers seem to do this thingamajig, but it doesn't sound good...oops, I have some instances of this in my own text, let's go and rewrite..."). It's good to give back to fellow writers, and learn something at the same time

I would rather get stung, while being trusting, than go through life being suspicious of the motives of others.

Janet, there is nothing wrong with realism. It is your best protection in the publishing business, because scams abound in this arena.

Best of luck to you, whatever you choose.

Christine N. · Feb 6, 2006

Janet, you can always post a bit of your work here at AW on the "Share your Work" forum. It's free, and people here usually give pretty good feedback.

Publishers loyalty is to the reader, not the author. Why? Because the readers buy the books. It's their job to put good books on the market at a fair price. I admit, sometimes they don't succeed - things get published all the time that are, uh, well, not what I would consider stellar. But someone at some house did.

eqb · Feb 6, 2006

AmandaPA said:
I received a $2,500 advance though, unlike the $1.00 that I received from PA.

And unlike PA's books, your book also went through a real edit, not a Word spell-check, and it got real distribution, with industry-standard discounts and placement in bookstores, and also its cover price was not inflated above the going market rate. No?

AnnaWhite · Feb 6, 2006

First of all, a warm welcome to Ilovepensandpaper, AmandaPA, and Janet.

The experience, when one first falls out of PA's rosy illusion into PA's latrine of reality, is the hardest.

Then one needs to punch a few pillows for a while, scream to the moon, and vent one's frustration. This is a good place to vent!

Finally, one can again begin the journey towards one's dream, like Paulo Coelho's Alchemist.

PA is not the fulfilment of the dream, nor is it a stepping stone. It's just a pothole in the road.

But it does serve one valuable purpose. It is the beginning of a real-life lesson about the publishing industry. By bringing us to this forum, it brings us into contact with other writers, and with a wealth of information that may save us from falling into future potholes.

On another totally different note:

I'd like to remind anybody who would like to contribute their story to the True Stories About PublishAmerica site, to please PM me or email the website administrator. Stories can be long or brief, simple or dramatic. Anybody can contribute his/her story. I'm happy to help with any proof-reading.

Here's how the site works:

All the stories on the site remain the copyright of the respective authors. If anybody wants his/her story removed at any time, for any reason, it will take a simple PM or email to [email protected]. Similarly, if anybody wants any changes to their own stories, already on the site, send a PM or email. I will only post a story on the site after having the person's permission (ie, I will not use stories from forums without asking).

AmandaPA · Feb 6, 2006

Bookstore Placement

Beth, that is all true. It had a 55% discount for bookstores and was on the shelf of some bookstores. My book with PA started with a 40% discount, but with the new return policy was dropped to a ridiculous 5%. I have readers all across the country and out of this country who have sent me emails stating that they were unable to get bookstores to order my book for them since this new discount was implemented. This left me in the terrible position of either buying my own books and selling to them or telling them they would have to order online. It was embarrassing to say the least. In order to keep some of my readers I signed and mailed books as far away as Sweden, France and Australia. The postage rates for international air are very high and then add the cost of buying my own books. My book was doing pretty well before the discount was dropped and I was stupid enough to sign another contract with them. Now I'm stuck and I guess my new book will have this same 5% discount. Somebody please, just kick me for being so stupid.

If any of you other authors thinking of going with PA believe that your books will be in bookstores with this 5% discount, think again. It won't happen. If your readers can't go into a bookstore and either buy the book from the shelf or order the book, you will lose most of those readers. I'm talking about readers who are not family or friends. After all your family can only buy so many books and then what?

Aconite · Feb 6, 2006

Amanda, I hope you won't continue to think of yourself as stupid. You may have made a bad choice, but that doesn't make you stupid. Keep the blame where it belongs: on PA's deceptive advertising and author-unfriendly practices.

keltora · Feb 6, 2006

James D. Macdonald said:
586 sold in 2005, 23 so far in 2006.

Alas that the Indepence Books program is apparently no more! AN would have been a shoo-in for that coveted status.

(For those who came in late, the Independence Books program was a special deal by PublishAmerica a few years ago. If a book sold 500 copies, it would be made returnable! A half-dozen (out of thousands of titles) qualified. Then ... they stopped doing that.)

Valentine's Day is coming up. Give that special someone a copy of Atlanta Nights!

Well, shuckey Darn...

At least we're over 600 copies sold.

Take that, PA!

And speaking of Publish(scam)America, it broke my heart to look at the local papers Sunday and see out of a list of 15 local authors, four had books with PA and one with Authorhouse.

So there are still people falling into the trap...

*sigh*

Time for me to write an 'eye-opening' letter to the Knoxville Writer's Guild and remind them that they should not be promoting PA as a good idea.

Though I suspect it is a couple of local PA authors, including one who now has four or five books with them, who keep promoting it.

Kevin Yarbrough · Feb 6, 2006

I use to be one of the PA devout but when I went to the convention I learned a few thins, after I got home and did some looking I began to see the light. I wanted to see how truthful their rejection rate was so I took 30 pages of one of my WIP and coppied it over and over and over and sent it in. They accepted it. When I went online and told everyone what I did they recinded the offer.

A few months later I received a CC'd letter from PA's attorney that he had sent to the FBI and my local police department. In it it stated what I did was fraud and that I that something should be done about me. That night a cop showed up at my house, a cop who refused to show his badge and then told me to fix things with PA in a week or he would arrest me for deceptive practice, something that PA wasn't even claiming. Now, no money ever changed hands so deceptive practice isn't something that would stick. The fraud charge was also bogus since what I did was not fraud, as I found out from a literary attorney. PA's attorney knew this but sent out the letter anyway. It was a scare tactic to shut me up and to get me to go away. It was unethical on PA's attorney's part, but he didn't care. I hope he is getting his fill with all that is going on with PA these days. What comes around, goes around Vic.

DaveKuzminski · Feb 6, 2006

Kevin Yarbrough said:
A few months later I received a CC'd letter from PA's attorney that he had sent to the FBI and my local police department. In it it stated what I did was fraud and that I that something should be done about me. That night a cop showed up at my house, a cop who refused to show his badge and then told me to fix things with PA in a week or he would arrest me for deceptive practice, something that PA wasn't even claiming. Now, no money ever changed hands so deceptive practice isn't something that would stick. The fraud charge was also bogus since what I did was not fraud, as I found out from a literary attorney. PA's attorney knew this but sent out the letter anyway. It was a scare tactic to shut me up and to get me to go away. It was unethical on PA's attorney's part, but he didn't care. I hope he is getting his fill with all that is going on with PA these days. What comes around, goes around Vic.

You should send a copy of that letter to the Bar Association in Maryland so they can discipline that lawyer.

James D. Macdonald · Feb 6, 2006

Kevin Yarbrough said:
I use to be one of the PA devout but when I went to the convention I learned a few thins, after I got home and did some looking I began to see the light.

I doubt you were the only one who talked with other authors and compared notes. That may be why there hasn't been a second annual PA convention.

LloydBrown · Feb 6, 2006

Kevin Yarbrough said:
A few months later I received a CC'd letter from PA's attorney that he had sent to the FBI and my local police department. In it it stated what I did was fraud and that I that something should be done about me. That night a cop showed up at my house, a cop who refused to show his badge

That seriously sounds like somebody who is not a cop!

If you ever encounter that situation, pick up the phone and call the police. Tell them somebody is pretending to be a police officer and you want to verify his identity. If he's a cop, he'll wait (probably impatiently, thinking you're a jerk). If not, then you have a problem, but at least you have the cops on the phone. If you have a second person present, get a video camera.

It's really sad to see how belligerent this scam company is with its scamees. Thank God they're not competent, too.

DaveKuzminski · Feb 6, 2006

That or PA expected the authors to buy each other's books in droves and that didn't happen. PA obviously didn't get as much bang out of the one free package of kool-aid as they expected.

aka eraser · Feb 6, 2006

Janet, your posts are literate (though they could use a few paragraph breaks). Your manuscript probably is as well. On this basis alone it would rank in the top 10% or so of a publisher’s slushpile.

This thread is not made up solely of disgruntled PA authors with an axe to grind. Regular contributors include commercially published writers, editors, at least one publisher, industry watchdogs, and a lawyer extremely well-versed in all matters related to publishing - in short, folks who know literary shine from shinola.

Their motives are completely altruistic. They want to spare writers the pain of discovering the hard way that they made a bad choice when they went with Publish America. They most especially want to dissuade those writers like you, who appear to be very serious about their craft, from making that bad choice.

This thread is only a small part of what the AW Water Cooler has to offer. I hope you’ll explore the rest of it.

Thanks for posting. Good luck. And please stick around.

Ken Schneider · Feb 6, 2006

PA statements, and meanings.

S : "Our books are stocked in stores from sea to shining sea."

M: Authors have placed their books in local stores on consignment, in every state in the U.S., not PA.

S: "We never charge any author fees, ever."

M: They don’t, but, you must pay for your own copyright fee 30.00, to the U.S. copyright office, not PA.

Define what a writer would consider a fee charged by a publisher. No Commercial publisher charges fees. Only vanity presses, for editing, cover work, formatting. PA doesn’t edit books, they check for spelling errors. That is the authors job at PA. P.A. is reverse vanity. This means that they receive their funds for producing a book when the author buys them, which most do.

S: "PublishAmerica is not in any way a POD publisher."

M: They are. POD means publish on demand. P.A. books are printed as they are ordered. PA does not do print runs of books, i.e. print 5,000 copies for distribution to bookstores.

S: Here, "Now, a word of caution is in order. Bookstore availability is not necessarily the same as bookstore shelf display. For a book to be stocked by a bookstore, someone high in the hierarchy must decide to order it. Typically, it's not the store manager who makes such decisions, unless he runs an independent store. Larger chains such as Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble, and Borders have "buyers" who select which titles are to be stocked. Oftentimes, they want to see some noise happening before they move."

M: Noise/ mass advertising having been done by the publisher, book reviews, or large pre-release demand for a title. PA has no advertising department. Their focus for advertising is directed to the authors. Book reviewers such as the NYT, Kirkus, and others, know what PA is, and won’t review books.

Contradiction: Here: "A bookstore's decision to stock a book is generally made by the manager. A bookstore typically stocks just one percent of the 190,000 new books that are published each year. For bookstores to stock all books published would mean adding 20 feet of new shelf space every day, seven days per week. Therefore bookstore managers must be selective on what books they choose."

M: Selective/ Choosing the books that have a reasonable price in line with commercial standards. Books that fit their shelves. Books that have a standard return % attached. PA offers what is called a short return 5%. No bookstore will stock, nor sometimes order, an overpriced, unedited, short discount, first time author’s book.

S: "And, by the way, we are indeed number one. No other traditional book publisher has as many new books in print, every day!"

M: Here: http://www.publishamerica.com/index.asp They run an author mill. They push as many authors through the system, per day, as they can. More authors, more authors buying books. Being number one in the publishing industry means, book sales, not authors in print or books printed. I have no doubt that, No other publisher has as many new books in print per day, not printed, sold or read.

When reading the information on the PA home page, and contemplating submitting, ask questions, don’t assume you know what the answer is.

PA’s wording is crafted with a careful hand, and eye toward a double meaning.

What the traditional meaning of statements such as, "Our books are stocked in stores from sea to shining sea," meant to me when I read it, was that my book will be stocked in bookstores like every other authors book I’d seen there. We know with PA this is not what is meant.

There are many, many more words and PA meanings that must be covered. Doing so would take up oodles of space. The answers are here in the form of former PA authors, and knowledgeable people who have fought against the PA scam.

Your questions will be answered with truth and honesty here at AW.

You must be the person who decides whose side of the topic to believe.

PA, is not a threat to the publishing industry. Their books are not geared to sell to the reading public.

They admit to 17,000 authors on their rolls.

They admit to coming up on a million sales since their inception in 1999.

That is an average of 58.8 sales per author.

Ken Schneider · Feb 6, 2006

janetbellinger said:
Actually, But is it their job to censor the marketplace, to publish only authors who they know will sell a hundreds of thousands of copies, thereby making sure that the reading public only has access to books that are geared to the masses? What if my book might appeal to a segment of the population? Should those readers be denied a chance to read my book, just because the approved publishers opt to turn me down?

Janet Bellinger
Teacher on the Run
Rain
Silver Sighs

Who will get your books to the masses? PA dosn't have that type of distribution.
With the price of gas, and the nasty demeanor of bookstores when faced with another PA author, you'll go broke doing it yourself.

Trust me, been there, done that. I'm hard-headed, too. Enjoy the trip.

PA preys on people who have no publishing experience, don't know the industry ropes. That is how people are suckered in.

Woody Hayes once said, "Anything easy ain't worth a damn." Anyone can be printed by PA, it's easy. It's hard to be good enough to be published by a real publisher.

No one will read your book, because it will not be anywhere that they are.

I'll tell you what will happen, [I've been through the PA grinder], your book will come out. You will buy copies to sell to those in your town. You will go to the local bookstores, who won't stock it with out you giving it to them on consignment. You will set up one or two book signings, and will sell a few books to the locals, if you bring your own books. Then you will go home, and after a few months, you will keep staring at the box of leftover books in the corner, and drop the price to five buck to get rid of them, give a few away, and keep one as a rememberance of what not to do again.

There are fine, editors, and teachers of the writing craft right here at AW, free.

They are more than helpful.
See you in a year. We will be here to welcome you back. Just as friendly, and just as willing to help you with your writing.

NicoleJLeBoeuf · Feb 6, 2006

janetbellinger said:
Perhaps, as you say, it is not a publisher's job to sell authors their own books. But is it their job to censor the marketplace, to publish only authors who they know will sell a hundreds of thousands of copies, thereby making sure that the reading public only has access to books that are geared to the masses?

Well, if you want to put it that way, yes.

But that's not an entirely accurate way of putting it.

I've been reading forums at AW long enough that I'm starting to feel like I'm spouting from Uncle Jim's Concise Book of Pithy Writerly Sayings (which I would totally love to see him publish, by the way). Here comes one of 'em:

It's the publishers' job (and that of the editors and agents) to be the reader's advocate.

They aren't looking for books "geared towards the masses," per se. What they're looking for are books with ripping good stories that are well written, because those books have the known effect of selling "hundreds of thousands of copies" (or at least tens of thousands, or, well, thousands, in which case a small commercial publisher, like MMo said, is the way to go). Why? Because readers want to read good books! Not "commercial" books. Not "trendy" books. Good books.

Some of us feel that literary agents and the acquiring editors at commerical publishing houses are good judges of that, and so we let the acceptance letter tell us when we've finally produced something of quality.

Those of us who do not agree--who feel that our books are just fine and dandy the way they are, thank you, and all those gatekeepers between us and mass market distribution are just mean old poopyheads trying to maintain the stagnant status quo and prevent our mind-blowing latest golden words from reaching the public? Well, if that's how we feel, we can self-publish, or go with a vanity publisher.

But for the Gods' sakes, if you go that route, 1. go with an honest vanity publisher or self-publishing aid, one with a reasonable, non-deceptive contract, one that doesn't try to pose as a commercial publisher, one that doesn't cheat you of your royalties or sell books to which they no longer have the rights or abuse its authors with "don't take that tone with us" letters.

And 2. realize that the readers will be the final judge of whether your distrust of the institutional "censors" was well-founded. After all, it's those "censors" job to maintain a certain quality level of selection on the book shelves. If your writing isn't yet up to that quality level, then no matter how cleverly you bypass the gatekeepers, the readers inside that castle they're guarding won't be fooled.

(And if your writing isn't up to that quality yet, there's no reason to suppose it never will be! Write the next book. And the next. And the next. That's the only way you learn this craft and trade.)

NicoleJLeBoeuf · Feb 6, 2006

Sheryl Nantus said:
PA encourages this with the constant repetition of the conspiracy theory - that somehow there's no need for new writers by publishers and that it's a closed shop. Of course it only takes a few minutes surfing the Net to find new writers being signed by agents and publishers almost daily in a variety of genres. To say nothing of e-pubs and small presses expanding to include more and more new writers.

Isn't there a thread somewhere on the AW Water Cooler that exists specifically to list and announce debut novel sales by AW members?

If not, there should be. And it should be linked along with the other threads we remind people about when discussing PA. It's great to remind PA's potential victims that no, the publishing industry is not closed to no-name no-sales-yet writers, but it's even better to be able to say, "For example, check out Liam over here. He posts here all the time. Go chat with him about his experience selling his very first book. You can send him a PM, for goodness's sake. Here's a link to his profile page."

Maybe it should be in the "writing novels" forum? Or the "self-promotion" one, or the "achievements" one?

James D. Macdonald · Feb 6, 2006

What Bonnie didn't mention is that she was one of PA's top sellers and appeared in PA's New York Times Book Review ads. See the Index to the NEPAT for information on the NYTBR ads.

The letter itself is first quoted here:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=524&page=64&pp=20

It was dissected here:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=524&page=66&pp=20

More (and more and more) on subsequent pages.

The New Never-Ending PublishAmerica Thread (NEPAT)

I write novels

Your Genial Uncle

Holding out for a Superhero...

Dances With Hamsters

haz a shiny new book cover

I write novels

Will write for peace of mind

Preditors & Editors

Your Genial Uncle

Preditors & Editors

Fish Whisperer

Absolute sagebrush

Absolute sagebrush

a work in progress

a work in progress

Your Genial Uncle