Primrose Road

A paragraph from (my) essay about how various new media educational resources attempt to recast interactivity as immersion:

The view of hypertext as a “writerly” medium may in itself be limited. First, it views interactivity as the key to hypertext’s potential. Lev Manovich notes that in an environment centered on a human-computer interface, interactivity is not a new development but rather a “tautology” (Manovich 55); hypertext and computer-based media are by definition interactive. And even if we label interactivity a non-necessity, it seems overly optimistic to view the intersection of interactivity and user control as a place for democracy, new economic models, new forms of publishing, and more effective teaching and learning methods.

The essay itself focuses on digital performances of Shakespeare and friends and the "more effective teaching and learning methods" part of the last clause of the paragraph above. Here, I'd like to examine the "new forms of publishing" aspect of the false promises attached to interactivity and user control.

New media communication does seem to promise (re)new(ed) forms of printing and publishing (blogging: the new pamphleteering?), but it also provides an ideal arena for scammers. Print-on-demand, which is not in itself a scam -- it actually works well for small presses who are genuinely trying to help new authors, and for non-scammish subsidy printers like iUniverse -- has unfortunately made it much easier for vanity presses to present themselves as legitimate publishers, because they can charge the author nothing and yet still take the author's money.

Publishers are supposed to invest in authors because they make money from book sales to book buyers and libraries, not from the authors themselves. If cash flows away from the author, then you're looking at a scam. But before print-on-demand and the World Wide Web, it was to some degree easier to identify these scams, because most writers would find any unheard-of company charging a $700 "setup" fee to be quite suspicious. Now, companies like PublishAmerica (link is to a critical Publishers Weekly article) can present themselves on their website as "traditional publishers" (their phrase) and even offer their clients a $1 advance because of print-on-demand technologies. Yet, money still flows away from the author: PA does not handle promotion as a "traditional publisher" would, does not invest the time and money to edit its books (remember that real editing involves much more than proofreading), and even encourages its authors to buy their own books as a means of promotion.

If we ignore the "traditional publisher" claims, we still cannot claim that PA is just a printing business. PA sends "acceptance letters" to authors who submit manuscripts; yet, as several sting operations have demonstrated, PA accepts virtually all manuscripts submitted. In this manner, it's no better than the International Library of Poetry, the perennial scam that praises entrants' poems and then encourages them to buy books, plaques, and mugs.

One incredibly disconcerting aspect of PA is that they take advantage of children and teenagers, convincing young people that their juvenilia is publication-worthy. I won't link to those books because I don't want to criticize young people who have been taken in by the scam.

Bloggers like literary agent Victoria Strauss have already written excellent exposés on PublishAmerica. For even more information on the scam, refer to Strauss' Writer Beware site and the Preditors and Editors entry for PA. Fortunately, while new technologies have allowed the PA scam to develop and grow, the Internet has at the same time served as an excellent forum for warning potential scam victims: despite PA's alleged cybersquatting practices, thirteen of the first twenty Google results for "PublishAmerica" are sites critical of the company.