PublishAmerica: The Worst Place You Can Sell Your Novel

First off, a quote from Amazon: "How to Upset a Goliath Book Biz: Publish America: The Inside Story of An Underdog With a Bite."

" Read the story of an underdog publishing company that set out to introduce the entire book publishing business to the twenty-first century. Nothing more, nothing less. PublishAmerica leveled the playing field for book writers almost overnight. It has successfully challenged Mainstream publishing by opening the gates to Main Street authors-thousands upon thousands of them. And the publishing elite reacts predictably. Written by PublishAmerica CEO Willem Meiners, with an introduction by company president Larry Clopper, How to Upset a Goliath Book Biz tells the story of the most captivating pioneers in today's traditional publishing industry, and their victorious legions of authors: The inside story of PublishAmerica."

I almost snorted my morning grapefruit all over my computer screen reading this. Wow. Amazing! They're toppling the publishing world! That must explain why I'd never heard of them until I heard the collective internet decrying their devilry.

Ahh, the sweet, sweet lull of the words, "You could be published!" Yes. Yes, to see my name in print, attached to the words I hammered out with my own grue and blood. Wonderfully tempting. It's a good thing blogs exist to get that out of our systems, eh?

Publish America is probably the greatest scam in existence. The beauty of it all is that they aren't doing anything illegal. They're stealing, skirting around the edge of the law in the shadow of light, and picking pockets. Their business, if it can be called that, revolves around the idea of Vanity.

Now let's not go on a tirade here. Vanity publishing serves a very important role in the publishing world. Without vanity publishing, authors with a niche audience could not reach that audience. Vanity publishing is only bad if you don't know what you're getting into. I know several people who have used vanity presses, such as Star (I think that's the name) and they've been thrilled with the results.

Publish America is not trying to provide a service. An honest vanity publisher won't turn down business, true, but they also won't lie to their clientele. Novels are not a good fit for vanity publishing, period. Tomes of Poetry, perhaps--books of recipes and I've even heard of people throwing their diaries into the vanity system. This is the niche vanity publishing serves, and it makes its money, for the most part, in an honest fashion.

Publish America is not the only dishonest vanity publisher out there, but they are by far the worst, with Poetry.Com falling just beneath them in terms of pure sleaze. They present themselves as an honest publishing firm. They promise fame, fortune, and all the things we authors crave. And they do print books. If you give them your hard-earned gold pieces, they'll pump your books, POD style, out of a press like Dairy Queen Soft-Serve from a tap. The printing job will be, at best, substandard, but there are a lot of perfectly respectable publishers who do lousy print jobs--novel readers don't tend to care how pretty a book is.

A real publishing firm employs editors. Lots of editors. Editors for proofing, editors for pitching, editors for sizing up, and then sizing down the contents of a novel--LOTS of editors. An author can pound out the most brilliant book in existence, but he (or she) is absolutely at a loss without the support of an editing team. One body simply cannot perform every task behind making a novel ready to sell. As much as we'd all like to believe it, we authors do not squeeze perfect prose from out our collective anuses. Editing can hurt. It's never bothered me, but it bothers a lot of authors.

This is the first thing Publish America fails at. They do not edit. They'll go over a manuscript for typos, sure, but that's not editing. That's something an author needs to do himself. It's called proofreading, and it is an entirely disassociated thing from editing. And they don't even proofread well. Reports have it that Publish America has actually inserted typos into their books.

Former Publish America Author Saundra Julian writes, "We had over three hundred mistakes in our "edit" to correct. 196 were PA-added mistakes and did not appear in the original m.s!"

No one reads manuscripts at Publish America--not the way an editor needs to read them. The tender love, and brutal hate of the red pen is nowhere to be found within this vanity publisher's stark walls.

Heck, Publish America will even promise to take an author's prose and print it without bloody touching the text. This is the first true sign that they are nothing more than a predator. Real publishing firms have reputations to maintain. They compete with one another. Publish America is disinterested in competing--they do not want to sell books on the open market, and this is proof. I can't get two chapters into most PA novels, and, believe me, I've tried. Sometimes out of pity for the authors, sometimes out of honest buyer's curiosity, and sometimes as favors: by god, I've tried, and it is a slam on the publisher, not the authors, when I can honestly say that I've never read anything worth remembering from Publish America.

Jenna Glatzer, an author and defender of authors, writes: "Their [Publish America's] designers design up to 25 book covers PER DAY... think of what that means. How much attention are the designers giving to each book?"

And published author James MacDonald writes: "The number of books they [Publish America] can accept depends on the number of hours in a day times the staff on hand. If they have 30 "editors" they'll accept 75-90 books per week (the first 18 books to come in the door). If they have 60 "editors" they'll accept up to 180 books a week. If they have 15 editors they'll only accept the first nine books to reach them on any given day."

The rest of the mire that Publish America dares to bill as "Traditional Publishing" whatever that dreck means, is a further spiral into madness. Their tomes, despite the cheap printing materials and shoddy craftsmanship, are prohibitive in cost. Further, it seems as if Publish America wants to make it actively impossible for a book store to buy Publish America books. Even if an author could convince a bookstore to give his novel a chance, the bookstore would never be able to make the book profitable. Paperback novels just don't need to cost forty-five bucks, (that's about what it'd be after brick-and-mortar costs.) and bookstore regulars recognize this.

What's worse, these jackals keep the rights to all of the books they "Publish" and make it damn near impossible for a new author to get picked up by a real publishing firm.

The law says that these people are not thieves. The law is wrong. Boycott Publish America, not that it'll be hard, and spread the word to all of your author friends. Publish America will steal from you, and you'll be expected to wear a smile. Do not submit your manuscript to these animals. Do not buy their books on Amazon. If you see someone about to submit their book to Publish America, grab them by the shirt lapels and slam your head into their face until common sense begins to exhibit itself.