Primrose Road

Some writing websites have taken interest in the case of a woman fired for publishing a thinly fictionalized critique of the library at which she works through PublishAmerica. Happily, the writers on the AbsoluteWrite message board are discussing why this is not entirely a free speech issue because libel and confidentiality breaches (which impinge on others' legitimate rights) come into play.

And, of course, these message board posters seem to be the only commenters our there right now acknowledging the fact that PublishAmerica is not a "grassroots organization ... willing to publish people who are unknown" (as Sally Stern-Hamilton asserted in the original Ludington Daily News article) but rather a known scam that takes advantage of inexperienced and/or young authors.

Amusingly, Stern-Hamilton, her book and her case are strongly supported by a site heavily critical of American libraries (not only considering them unsafe for children because of the purported presence of Internet-seeking pedophiles but also labeling the ALA's Banned Books Week as mere "propaganda").

So what have we learned, kinderlekh? If you're going to publish a book critical of your workplace, (1) don't use your maiden name as your pseudonym, (2) don't let your "publisher" send out publication announcements to your family and friends; moreover, don't publish with an organization that makes money by selling only to family and friends of authors, and (3) whatever you do, don't put a picture of your workplace on the cover of your fictionalized, hidden-beneath-a-vague-pseudonym account of your workplace.

A library employee in Michigan was fired after she wrote a book that portrayed co-workers and library patrons in an unflattering light. The book, while labeled a work of fiction, takes place in a rural community called "Denialville, Michigan" and offers, according to a letter written by the District Library Director, "detailed descriptions of their unique characteristics and mannerisms make them easily identifiable in our small community."

First, let me make it clear that I don't quite agree with the library's decision to fire this woman for writing a book. She's probably right to argue that "the public library is a pillar of free speech," and for this reason alone they shouldn't have used the book against her. Still, she's wrong to think that the library "invaded her privacy." Here's why:

- The publisher is none other than PublishAmerica.

- Upon "publication," PublishAmerica asks its authors for a list of names and addresses of up to 100 family and friends (they explicitly request that the author does not supply the names of press contacts).

- The library employee supplied a list of names and addresses of family and friends in her small Michigan town.

- These contacts received notice via snail mail and email that the book had been published.

- Not only were the "characters" in the story easily identifiable, but the book's cover was (this is the best part) a picture of the Ludington Library, the library at which she works.

And she wonders how her employers could have possibly found out about her book.

I am reminded of my spring term Business Writing students' argument about why diploma-mill "degree" holders who don't realize they have invalid credentials should be fired.

PublishAmerica "author news" of the week:

Ink Blots is Phillip C. Youngs' first book of poetry. He is hoping that with the book, he will be able to raise awareness of "pondering". The more society tries to make life simple; the less we tend to lose the ability to "ponder". Read Ink Blots; its a good read.

Visit my web page and read a sample of my poetry The Nation Cried was writtent fot 09-11-01 web page is thenationcried.com follow the link "Windows of the heart" to view and purchase my book. Leave a blog while your there.

Life Through the Rearview Mirror was released June 2008. It's a collection of 50 life poems. Poems that will touch your heart. Poems about love, life, hate, death nd all the emotions that we all go through life looking back and wondering what if.

Rebecca, just finished her final pdf and is moving on to the next faze of production. She has set up signing @ Walden in Ashland, Ky, Jesse Stuart foundation in Ashland, Ky, and the Briggs libraries in Lawerence Co Ohio! Who knows, her next big step could even be HOLLYWOOD. We shall see? Congratulations again Rebecca Lesler on the big steps toward your dreams!

... just in case you weren't sure whether or not the "publisher" takes advantage of people who don't understand how and why the publishing industry works.

As several writing blogs have reported, Amazon.com will continue to list but no longer sell print-on-demand books, apparently because it now has its own POD service, Booksurge.

This is somewhat interesting ethically. Here's why:

1) Amazon's move has the potential to kill POD outlets who present themselves as "traditional publishers" (i.e. PublishAmerica) and prey on young and inexperienced writer-hopefuls. Authors may be more likely to realize, upon learning that their books will not include a "buy" button on Amazon, that PublishAmerica (along with similar businesses) is not a "traditional publisher," but rather a printer who makes money by selling books to authors, not readers. In other words, the fake duck (POD businesses who masquerade as real publishers) won't look so much like the real duck anymore.

2) Yet Amazon appears at this point to be motivated by a desire to monopolize the POD industry, only selling POD books printed by their own POD service. Remember, POD in general isn't such a bad thing: it can be useful for printing a small book with a small run for a small, specific group of people (for example, a family history for a family reunion. Ironically, you'd likely take in more money this way than if you printed a novel intended for public consumption through a POD service, because you wouldn't have to spend anything on marketing!). Therefore, while it's terrific that Amazon might potentially kill POD scams, it seems unfair that it could also kill non-scam POD printing businesses.

Interestingly, watchdog site Preditors and Editors, currently being sued by PublishAmerica for libel and also trying to bring up a civil suit against the scam, does not support Amazon.com's decision "because it would set a dangerous precedent for other print-on-demand publishers and their printers who could be forced out of business." Here's hoping, then, that PublishAmerica gets brought down by the civil suit and not by Amazon.com's odd (yet not unheard of) move to promote its own service.

Earlier this week, a student excitedly told me that his friend knew of "a place where you could get your book published for free." PublishAmerica seems to prey on teenagers and young adults because, as people who likely don't know how the publishing business works, they're easy targets. They (and often their parents) don't understand how it can still be a scam if they put no money down and are listed on Amazon. I don't fault the victims here, though I advise everyone to research the publishing industry before signing a contract.

A handful of examples of unsalable (except to family and friends) books by teenagers that PA has published in recent years:

- 3/12/08: a 257-page sci-fi novel written by a high school senior; retails for $21.95.

- 3/1/08: a 405-page fantasy novel by a sixteen-year-old author. According to the article, "Unlike many writers, Gamble believes in rewriting. She spent about eight months on "Regenero.""

- 6/3/07: Sci-fi novel by a fifteen-year-old author. The book, described in the young man's local newspaper as a "novel," is 56 pages long.

- 7/13/06: 18-year old author, 195-page novel, back cover copy begins, "Kaneka Veratu thought her life was normal. She thought she knew her family. She thought she knew the truth. She was wrong."

- 4/5/06: a 150-page novel by a high school senior. The book retails for $19.95, and the back cover copy begins "Everything changes; life revolves around change. It's not like one day you wake up and you're married with a kid. I mean, there has to be something major in between. I guess that's what it was-something that passed the time. Adolescence-that's the time in between."

- 10/20/05: Sixteen year-old author of a 59-page murder mystery for preteens holds a book signing at (I know you may not be able to access the full articles from where you are, but I promise I'm not making this up) Chick-Fil-A.

- 5/30/05: Seventeen-year-old high school senior publishes 160-page novel. According to the article, "Brianna’s father only stepped in to help negotiate the contract with PublishAmerica. In her deal, Brianna is guaranteed a percentage of her book sales. That percentage increases if a certain number are sold." So ... what's 'negotiable' there? Were they initially not going to offer her royalties?

- 11/2/03: Fourteen-year-old writes a book about "a teenage elf who saves the world." PA published his second book in late 2005.

And a brief, slightly related aside: squib, via PixieStix, reports on what could be the most unintentionally hilarious yet uncannily socially insightful vanity-press published children's book ever.

I'm not a writer but was semi-scammed by one of these pay-to-print organizations when I was a teenager and thought I was a writer (drippy as I was, I at least knew not to invest my own money in marketing). Therefore, I'd like to bring the following news item to your attention:

Watchdog site Preditors and Editors is being sued for libel by scam-tacular "publisher" PublishAmerica's lawyer.

Though the suit will likely prove costly (P&E is seeking donations to help them defend their own practices, which are incredibly helpful to young and newbie writers), it is certainly worth for P&E to allow PublishAmerica to drag them into court, because it would give P&E's side a right to discovery, and perhaps once and for all expose PublishAmerica's business practices for what they are.

So, if the announcements in your local paper from (often very young or very old) "published authors" excited about their $1 advances gets to you, or if the announcements here break your heart a little while you're snickering at them, I'd suggest donating to P&E's defense fund.

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).

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.