Primrose Road

PublishAmerica's website (which I'm not going to link to) makes for some great procrastinating on a Saturday afternoon when one should be composing next semester's syllabi, preparing for a capstone oral exam, reading Renaissance "theatre wars" pamphlets, and/or reading books about the phenomenology of theatre.

I don't intend to ridicule PA 'published authors' with the excerpts below; I just want to use them to point out how ridiculous their "publish anything" model is, and how they take advantage of young and inexperienced aspiring writers.

(For the uninitiated, Miss Snark offers a nice outline of PA's 'business model.')

So as I began my procrastination-fest through the site, I first came across the following on the "Author News" page:

Upon "ORIGINAL" release of his historically accurate-short western fiction novel, ISBN No. **********, the author purchased 75 copies of his own, in-which many relatives,friends, and business associates, have come to the forefront. Yet now, especially with the Holiday-Season he is finding himself turning allot of people away and towards P.A. and as well the many fine book-stores. The reason for this is so they can order the revised copy which sells for the same price.The general consensus according to three notable historical societies is, 'For the history and mystery slueths alike, Coping With In-Laws And outlaws is an interestingly good read.'

Dude. If you have to buy 75 copies of your own book, something's rotten in the state of Denmark. Ten points (payable in chips from the Atlantic City casino of your choice) to anyone who can point out everything that's wrong with this blurb, not including the grammar.

Unfortunately, a search for "Shakespeare" didn't turn up anything too hilarious. There was, however, a novelization of the sonnets: Shakespeare's in love with Mary Wriothesley, Southampton's mom, and when she cheats on him, he apparently berates her with lots of word-order-reversals, thees, thous, arts, and cansts.

Then there's the book in the "Philosophy" section with the following (rather straightforward, no?) description:

Twelve-year-old boy meets Life and loses his innocence.

I'll let that one speak for itself.

Most icky are those book descriptions that remind me of my own juvenilia:

Eva is a happy college student. She enjoys her classes, loves her friends, and enjoys an active social life at Montgomery University. A self-proclaimed “serial monogamist,” she hops from one boyfriend to another, never taking anything too seriously. That is, until she meets Peter, a law student who manages to turn her world upside down. Debut author Melissa Brown takes us into the college experience of Eva and her two best friends, McKenna and Grace, as they sort through all of the frogs in their lives, each hoping to find her prince. Will Peter be the right one for Eva? Or is he just a frog in disguise? As these three friends search for attention and love, they end up learning a lot about themselves: what they are capable of, and what they truly want from their lives.

Here, PA has apparently "acquired" a totally unmarketable book, because as the person who finally convinced me to stop writing fiction once told me, nobody wants to read a book about a group of friends to whom not much happens. Chick lit books, love 'em or hate 'em, have plots and plot twists.

According to legend, there were four women who founded the religion of Wicca long ago. Each of them hid her secret, and when the time came they called upon their respective elements to keep that secret. Today, there are four teenage girls who are descended from those women. Paiva Cerron could never have imagined that her mother was a Wiccan, and that she was the last of the Fireflint line, but now she must. Now there are evil witches being sent to kill her to keep the four girls from uniting to put an end to Marguerite, the Queen of all evil witches. If they cannot stop Marguerite, then the world will be plunged into darkness, and the line of Wiccans will end. Paiva must do what she has to in order to save her race. She is not just any Wiccan, but the Wiccan.

The fact that Wicca is not an ancient religion and was in fact developed (possibly out of ancient British stuff and handed-down traditions, but also out of some faulty anthropology and what we'd today call History Channel history) in the 1950s suggests to me that the above novel was inspired not by, say, Gerald Gardner, but by the TV series Charmed.

For anyone still considering publishing with any "publisher" whose website is directed not at readers, but at 'new authors', please see 101 Reasons To Stop Writing.

I should unprocrastinate right now and get back to phenomenology, but I also want to take advantage of what could be my last MLA-free Christmas break for a while (unless I get a job without a completed dissertation in hand, in which case you'll want to be sure to carry an umbrella at all times due to the less-thought-about complications of swarms of flying pigs).