Publish America - A Publisher's Dream or Nightmare?

If you got to the Publish America website and read what the company says they are all about, and then read the forums, you might think wow this is a great way to get my writing published! Well if you do a little more looking into this website you will find that they say a lot of things but don't deliver on much of what they say. Many authors have signed contracts with Publish America and then found out to late that the company has misled them. The company doesn't straight out lie on their website but with clever word usage they make you believe things that are not true, don't trust this publisher with your hard work.

First if you want to check out the Publish America website at (http://www.publishamerica.com/) you can take a look around and see what you think about the company. Once you are done reading all the lies then you might want to read the rest of this article so you will know what the company really means when they say things like "Available" in bookstores.

First let me point out what Publish America claims on their website and then I will define it for you, so you know what they truly mean.

--"The majority of our books that are sold retail are sold in physical brick and mortar bookstores."

Take a shot at this, go into any book store and try to find a book published by Publish America, even ask the managers of the store and they will tell you that they don't carry books from POD or Print on Demand publishers. When Publish America says your books will be sold in retail stores have to be ordered, they won't even have your book on the shelf. Where this isn't a false statement it is a misleading one. Many authors are lead to believe their books will be sold nation wide and in reality they will just be available for order.

--"We assign an editor who goes through the text line by line."

Another misleading statement, the editors first are not true editors, they will normally run your book through a word editor to check for mistakes but this often times creates more typos than it fixes. You can expect your book to have typos and plenty of errors with their crap editing, if you want to call it editing.

--"We reject 80% of submissions."

This is very untrue an author Kevin Yarbrough tested this, he wrote 30 pages and then copy and pasted those 30 pages over and over, submitted his story and was approved and ready to sell his masterpiece. This tells you they don't even read the submissions they receive.

Other reasons why not to trust Publish America, well they put a gag order on anyone who leaves their company and makes them sign a contract saying if they want to break their contract they can only tell people they left Publish America amicably. They also monitor their message boards in their forums and if you speak out against Publish America you are quickly banned and your message is deleted.

This company can't be trusted, they mislead their writers and then don't do much for them, and the only thing Publish America will do to sell your book is solicit your relatives, if you give them their names and addresses. They are also well known for trying to get the authors to buy multiple copies of their own books. They offer weird discounts to the author if they will buy hundreds of copies of their own books.

Publish America makes money in a deceitful way and these naïve authors are the ones paying the price. Many of the authors have had the dream to be published for years and then Publish America tells them they are going to make their dream a reality, but the reality isn't close to what the authors expect and many dreams end up nightmares. What ever you decide make sure before you publish with Publish America, please do lots of research on the internet and don't just trust the PA website it is biased.

A few good sites to look at for more information on Publish America are this blog and this story. They both provide some good insider views on what happens if you publish with Publish America and what might be some repercussions of the decision. Read carefully and make a choice and I hope all works out for you.