Question for thought and honest answers

[Mee]

I have heard and read allot a flack and bad reports about PublishAmerica but I have also read what they have to say about it all. My question is: has anybody actually published with PA and had a bad experience lately, been treated poorly or is this all just hear-say from someone who got their a bad taste from them a long while ago? I really want to know. I want to hear from people who have actually been there.

[Rebecca]

Moving this to the POD forum...

[DrRita]

Here's a huge thread on Publish America you might want to browse through.

Publish America (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10211)

[Gravity]

Mee: I was there. They accepted my MS in August 2001 (before there was much on the Net about them, otherwise I would have run like a scalded ape). My book came out in spring 2002, and that's when the rot set in. Rot, nothing. It was an unshirted nightmare. After I realized what they'd done, I secured a lawyer and began a campaign to get the rights back (which happened last February). In the meantime I wrote a new, better book, got an agent, and ended up getting a three-book deal with a solid CBA house. Since then I've completely rewritten my PA book, and now my agent has requests for partials for it from eight other CBA houses.

A good place to have your eyes opened about PA is the AbsoluteWrite website (I post there). There are literally thousands of posts describing the entire scam, from people who were there. These include both former PA employees and angry, disillusioned writers. Read it, and then decide.

[tlm]

I am so sorry that I didn't see this thread sooner and I hope that you have not signed a contract or anything yet.

My story is much like Gravity's story. I received my acceptance a few days after the 9-11 attacks and had read a lot of articles about how newspapers, book, and magazine publishers were scrambling for conservative, uplifting pieces to publish. For that reason, I was not too suspicious about PA (which went by America House at the time) working quickly to get me a contract. There was nothing about them on the Internet at the time. Believe me, I looked!

If you have read any of the other stories, I have little to add. I signed a 2 book contract and wanted to be a person of my word. I wrote the 2nd book and had a humiliating nightmare--worse than being my own salesperson for the 1st book.

I worked hard on a good story. I wanted to honor God, even though I felt I was being ripped-off in a HUGE way. When I received my proofs, I was horrified. I had a 132 page book. It contained 164 SETS of errors that were added by the publisher's spell check. Some of those sets of errors were repeated throughout the book (such as the misspelling of my name on the odd pages). I spent about 10 hours listing all the errors so they could be corrected--essentially proofing my own manuscript--something they were "charging" me to do anyway. They told me that they couldn't read the way I had sent the corrections. I took another 4 hours to rewrite the corrections and send them on a different file. Again, they said they couldn't read them. Naturally they blamed me for the errors in the first place. Since I had a copy of the original, I knew that wasn't true. Their spell-check changed the words in Portuguese to Spanish, plurals to possessive, and possessives to plurals, etc.

I am a school teacher. I couldn't allow my students to read an error filled book with my name on the jacket! I really prayed about this. I wanted to honor God by fulfilling my contract, but knew I would lose all credibility as a teacher with this horrible book. I finally asked to be released of my contract. PA sent me my rights back for both books. Now my first book, Chance Encounters, exists as an e-book with Lulu.

End of story, but not end of my career!!thumbsup!

[Naomi Musch]

Mee,
I published with them a little over a year ago, and I've not had the problems that the other folks have had. Actually, it's gone well. I doubt if I will do it again, though, simply because of the direction I want to take with my work, and the books are expensive. I guess that even though I hadn't found all the negative reports on the web that seem so easy to find now, I did go into it with my eyes wide open, and understanding that I would be marketing my books. I have, however, been able to find them everywhere on the internet, Amazon, Booksamillion, etc. -- even a site in Germany which only houses authors with my last name! Funny, huh. Maybe PA has cleaned up their act some, I don't know. Maybe I was just fortunate and didn't have certain expectations knowing that they were basically a POD publisher. Either way, I'll just wait out my contract I think, and keep trying to get the word out. Maybe someday I'll rewrite and publish with another house. Who knows? Only God.
Blessings to you as you try and sort it all out.

[Gravity]

Mee: I agree with Naomi. It all depends on what you're looking for.

For non-fiction, where a writer is looking to get some books done that they can then sell at the back of the room, POD can work. The key to that, of course, is making sure the books can be printed cheaply enough to make it worthwhile. This is where PA flubs it. As Naomi said, their per-copy cost is quite high; companies like Lulu can do the same job for a lot less. Plus with firms like that the writer never loses their rights for even a day, much less the seven years PA requires.

Fiction, of course, is a whole different critter. Because POD allows for no bookstore placement (save where the poor harried writer can badger the manager into it), that means national readership will be quite small, nearly nonexistent. On average, PA sells seventy-five copies to the author, upon whom the onus comes of having to move those books. Internet sales will be negligible; when's the last time you saw a high-priced novel on amazon (PA books average $21.95 for a 300-page trade paperback) by an unknown that caused you to part with your money? People LIKE bookstores, being able to hold a novel, peruse it, and then pay for it. Plus POD still carries a stink of vanity (fairly or unfairly), and legimate reviews will be hard to come by.

Oddly enough, this very topic came up during a workshop I taught at last year's Glorieta conference. The question about PA was raised, and I explained it as well as I could. When it was over, an older lady came up, tears filling her eyes. In a nutshell, her health was failing and she'd just signed that nasty seven-year deal with PA for her "once-in-a-lifetime" novel. "They've taken me,haven't they, John?" she said, as the tears started falling at last. Heartsick, I agreed. "What do I do now?" she asked. Get a literary attorney, I answered. Fast.

And folks, that's the heartbreak of PA.

[tlm]

That is such a sad story. It is equal to the one I read on the PA web site back when I first started posting. The woman was in bad health. She posted that she didn't want to be a millionaire. She just wanted to make enough money to pay for her medical treatment. I wanted to cry.

[Mee]

Thanks Gravity--This is Mee. I though lulu.com only published for digital webbooks. Am I wrong or right.

Winner

[Gravity]

Nope. Lulu can print single or multiple hard copies of books as well as e-books. I've never used them for either service, but from what I've heard it's pretty easy to do. Plus, in a nontangible sense, although Lulu is POD, it doesn't seem to carry the same psychic smarminess that PA does.

[tlm]

Check out http://www.Lulu.com

[tlm]

Plus, in a nontangible sense, although Lulu is POD, it doesn't seem to carry the same psychic smarminess that PA does.

That's because you know what you're getting into right from the start and they are way cheaper.

CafePress is another option.

[Mirtika]

A couple of Christian SF webzines with which I'm involved publish print copies through LULU. Lulu is not going to give you the kind of quality a top-notche, "real" publisher does, but you can get something readable for a much more affordable price than, say, a PA. For specific projects, I think LULU is a good service.

And, being honest here, I have only read one POD novel all the way through, and I bought it only after reading an excerpt and checking several reviews to ensure it had an adequate level of prose quality. In my experience, self-published fiction ranks as pretty awful. I've occasionally read an excerpt from a self-pubbed novel so mind-achingly horrible that my brain had to go nap a few hours to recover. I've yet to read a vanity/self-pubbed novel that I'd rank anywhere above "merely okay." And most I've skimmed I'd rank well below "okay." My experience has led me not to be inclined to purchase any POD/self-pubbed except as a "charity case," that is, to support a pal. Friendship costs a few bucks, sometimes. :)

I will agree with the comment that POD is an excellent resource for folks who teach classes or give seminars. This is a way to have something to sell after a workshop or seminar on a specific topic or niche subject, a resource folks can carry home and be used.

Sadly, the PA's of the world are ready to rip off folks dying to be "published authors." I find that kinda sad, in the same way I find it sad when someone brags about being a poet because they got a poem printed in a poetry.com publication. It's an "honor" that means nothing, because they'll publish anyone. (If you doubt that, google it up and see the sorts of "tests" that folks like Dave Barry and others have done to show that poetry.com and its related organizations are a joke.)

Bottom line #1: Run far away from PA.

Bottom Line #2: Research every publisher who approaches you or to whom you choose to submt. The internet is your friend!

Mir

[Mee]

I agree, Mirtika. I had read much of the material on self-pubs and PODS. They will offer editting but at an extra price, and I don't know what kind of editting they do, to what extent. But that extra price isn''t cheap so many people who go that way see the original price for publishing and think that includes everything they need. They don't even see the added price foor editting. And when they never get a call or notice about the editting they think that the editting is don't automatically. I learned this the hard way. Many years ago I had a book done by Brentwood, a Christian vanity press. I din't know anything about editing, they sent me a galley but I didn't know that true editting was more than just correcting spelling. In the end I spent $600 for 250 copies of a book that was, spelled correctly, but all out of order. The thing would sell. That was a $600 lesson for me but I got on TV, a local cable talk show.

And with poetry. Most people , today, who think they are poets and publish their peotry (with PA poetry publishers) just write rhyme. They don't write limerac (I can't even spell it) or sonet. You can tell, I'm no poet, but even I can write rhyme, that's not hard. Robert Frost was a poet and he didn't just write rhyme. And what about the poem, Jaberwalki?