Publish Anything: The Saga of a PublishAmerica Author

by: Lisa Maliga

Publish Anything: The Saga of a PublishAmerica Author By Lisa Maliga My story is that an author who’d done online writing for such dot gones as Themestream, Written By Me, and The Vines, someone trying hard to have fiction, poetry and nonfiction in print for real, recommended PublishAmerica. She claimed it was a traditional book publisher. I was struck with their slogan, “We treat writers the old fashioned way – we pay them.” Wasn’t that what publishers were supposed to do? But since my novel was just sitting on the DiskUs Publishing site and doing nothing but supplying me with enough money to buy a pair of skate laces every three months, I thought maybe it would have a better chance over at PublishAmerica where it would be available as a trade size paperback both on and off-line. So this author, Ellen Du Bois, had a big thing on her Geocities site about books being available in brick & mortar bookstores & they’d have ISBN numbers and be online and all that stuff. Also had her full size book cover up so I sat there for 5 minutes waiting for the damn thing to appear. Not impressive, but she liked it. Ellen was a cheerleader for her book and sent reviews from a weekly community rag and she bulk e-mailed several pieces of correspondence during those heady days when her book was in prerelease, then release stage in the summer of ’03. I broke down and bought a copy from Amazon – took almost 3 weeks to get. And I struggled to read all 176 pages. Tripe. Clichés abounded. Spelling/grammatical errors weren’t there at least. But the writing was thin. The story moved too quickly. The main character was the most realistic as it was most likely based on the author. The dialogue was okay. The descriptions were minimal. Had there been a real editor, the book could’ve been very good. I wrote to Ellen and told her the positive things about the story, avoiding the negativities. She’d been an online correspondent for almost two years, yet after I didn’t review her book on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble she didn’t contact me. Almost a year later she sent me another e-mail – to promote a book of her poetry. I was just someone to sell a book to and she was only interested in the sale and hopefully a glowing write up. A Future PublishAmerica Author Since I’d already signed the contract with PublishAmerica, I wanted to cancel it after reading that trash. Now my book would be affiliated with a company that put out just about any piece of writing that came its way. I wasn’t expecting much what with my dealings with the extinct eNovel and RJ’s eBooks, along with a tiny eBook publisher named Crafts Across America where I wasn’t paid monthly as promised. And my novel and short story collection languished at DiskUs, home of the alleged Number One Best selling eBook author of all time, Leta Nolan Childers. PublishAmerica sent me an author’s questionnaire where they asked for basic biographical information; cover art suggestions, and a long list of people who might want to read my forthcoming novel. “Please prepare a list (names, and addresses,) of people who know you well enough to be interested in your success as a writer: personal friends, colleagues, relatives, etc., to receive a book announcement…Please limit your list and your labels to a maximum of 100 contacts. Also, please do not include businesses or organizations of any kind, including bookstores, media contacts, or government organizations. Include friends and associates only.” The editing process of my manuscript took two weeks over the Christmas holidays. I was able to ascertain that the first few pages had been read as some minor alterations had been made, but no changes followed for another 50 or so pages. One of the errors that occurred was clearly the result of a spellchecker on the part of PublishAmerica as a question mark appeared after the end of a statement. I’d read of real authors receiving instructions to change chapters, alter endings, delete numerous pages, in other words, really struggle to rewrite a book. Why so much effort? Names. Reputation. The publisher wanted to put their name on the best quality book that they had invested in. The author wanted a book that was saleable but also well written and something they were proud of. PublishAmerica’s editing comprised neither ideal as all they did was put the computer program’s spelling/grammar checker into action. My two free author’s copies arrived in early March and it was nice to see my trade paperback book in print sans a cheesy cover and stapled spine. ‘North of Sunset’ actually had decent looking stock cover art of a few silhouetted palm trees, a noticeable font, and a spine where the book title, publisher and author’s name was apparent. It would look good on bookstore shelves, I imagined. Reviews – What Reviews? What was Publish America doing to make sure my book was reviewed? Nothing. I decided to contact local daily and weekly newspapers by e-mailing a press release. The only responses I got were two e-mail autoresponders announcing the editors were on vacation. I spent $40 on copies of my book’s galley and mailed them to three national newspapers and the Library Journal magazine. Then I phoned a book reviewer at the ‘San Diego Union-Tribune’ and asked if he’d be interested in reviewing my book but before I could even describe what it was about, he asked who my publisher was. I told him. “We don’t review books by that publish