A number of years ago some sci-fi and fantasy authors wrote a book called Atlanta Nights. The book was not sci-fi or fantasy, because the prospective publisher (PublishAmerica) had publicly dissed sci-fi and fantasy authors.
PublishAmerica claimed to be a respectable publisher, though its critics claimed it was a vanity press.
After reading its diss of SF&F authors, several decided to exact revenge by writing a deliberately bad novel and getting PublishAmerica to agree to publish it, thus exposing the literary "standards" of the house for what they are.
The manuscript was not only filled with bad grammar and spelling, misused words, and internal contradictions. It also featured things like an "accidentally" duplicated chapter, an inexplicably missing chapter, and a chapter written by a computer program.
The manuscript was then submitted to PublishAmerica under the pen name Travis Tea (get it? say it fast).
The plan worked brilliantly. PublishAmerica offered to publish the book.
At least, it did until the authors publicly announced that the book was a hoax and then PublishAmerica did a "further review" that determined that the manuscript was "not ready to be published" after all.
Despite this setback, Atlanta Nights was eventually published and can be read online or ordered in hardcopy.
It also has some of the most remarkable blurbs in publishing industry history. For example, Jerry Pournelle raves:
"Don’t fail to miss it if you can!"
But best of all, it turns out that Travis Tea is a reader of this blog, and later today, Travis will give us the inside scoop on Atlanta Nights!
Yee-Haw!
Linking this PublishAmerica thing back to Catholic Apologetics…
Amateur apologists who frequent internet discussion forums may have seen forum spam from a particularly misguided anti-Catholic, marketing his own book published by PublishAmerica: Beyond Babylon – Europe’s Rise and Fall. http://www.publishamerica.com/shopping/shopdisplayproducts.asp?catalogid=7144
The author is a student of Herbert Armstrong’s interpretations of biblical prophecies. It was not uncommon to see this author claim for example that Queen Elizabeth is the rightful heir of the throne of David. Weird stuff to say the least. The author had a lot of weird claims about our new German Pope and his agenda as well. (In this gentleman’s reality, Germans are the modern descendants of the biblical Assyrians.)
The guy just recently got banished from a forum I frequent–not for his lunatic claims but for using the forum as free marketing for his book.
Sorry if this is sort of long, but I thought it interesting given the predominant theme of your blog. PublishAmerica apparently is about as concerned about fact checking as they are about general editing.
PublishAmerica is interesting in persuading you to buy a number of your own books at an exorbiant mark-up.
Though in this case, and in one I ran across myself — an egregiously bad SF writer who solicited advice in two forums that I knew of, only to be expelled from both for his abusive reaction — the vanity press does serve a person.
It keeps the lunatics from bothering normal publishers.
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