Primrose Road

I received a "friend request" and message on Facebook today from someone who, on his profile, claims that he's trying to put together a poetry anthology that would involve a 50-state book tour:

Greetings, I hope all is well. Do you write poetry by any chance, or know any writers? I could use more submissions for my anthology project, the theme of which is how people see America.

I can't decide whether this is just another anthology scam or the work of a naive kid who's really excited about creative writing.

Here's a sampling of what's on the SecretPressUSA website:

1. The site welcomes visitors with the words "Welcome, to a place of publications, and unique situations."

2. The project's goals are "To publish anthologies and other types of fictional publications" and "To create once in a lifetime reading and meeting opportunities, in the form of publications, and literary events."

3. The "this will not be a "vanity" publication, so do not ask if it is" argument would usually suggest that "this" is indeed a vanity publication.

4. However, "Fifty percent of anthology royalties will be split between Writers during the first two years the anthology is in publication. Royalties will be paid in six month intervals, via check or PayPal. Writers will receive a free copy of the anthology." The PayPal part of this doesn't sound like standard practice, though.

5. "Founding" members have had books published by pay-to-publish presses like Trafford, Outskirts, and InstantPublisher.com and known publishing scam PublishAmerica.

6. Why I'm going with the "naive kid" theory for now: the photos and videos pages announce that photos and videos of the US book tour will appear. It seems like the "publisher" is extremely excited about a book tour for an anthology that hasn't been compiled or edited yet.

According to their Facebook page, Secret Press USA's "goal is to offer the first anthology for $10," and I'm wondering about the logistics of that goal.

I don't want this to sound like a random attack on a random aspiring author, so I'll own up to the fact that I used to sound just like him. If you turn up the sound on your computer, you'll be able to *hear* the shame.

Victoria Strauss over at the Writer Beware blog writes on a rather creepy vanity publishing program that's overtly targeting teenagers. While other publishing scams have been targeting young adults for some time now, this one is downright wacky (and somewhat frightening).

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.