Publish America Quotes: Each day, an average 12 times a PublishAmerica author is invited to do a book signing or another in - store event at a bookstore or a library. An average 250 times each day, a bookstore calls or logs on to order a Publish America title. Of all the brick-and-mortar bookstores, Barnes and Noble is our largest customer. Borders/Waldenbooks and Books-A-Million are second and third. I spoke to Marcella Smith who is the Director of Operations at the Barnes and Noble New York Small Press Department. (All purchases through B&N must go threw her office.) She informed me that no Publish America book has ever been allowed purchase through her department and because of the lack of editing, poor cover design, lack of industry standard binding and pricing, PA books will never be allowed for shelf placement. They are only available online. Readers need to know that 80% (According to Writers Digest) or more of books purchased are by viewing them on the shelves.
Evidentiary information rebutting PA claim: Publish America Standard New Author Contract Paragraph 17: Sales promotion, advertising and publicity shall be at the Publisher's election and discretions to the extent, scope and character thereof and in all matters pertaining thereto. The author agrees to actively participate in promoting the sales o the said literary work in his home town area and elsewhere, by making himself available to media interviews, book readings and/or signings, and other public sales promotional appearances.
Publish America's marketing consists of sending 100 form letters to your family and friends. It's marketing department is structured to provide necessary information to other authors so that they can have their MSS and sell to their families. PA never sends out a press release about your book, never advertises. Author's pay to advertise their products. Authors pay for all marketing, mail-outs, radio promotion, etc. Authors pay - not the publishing company.
Publish America Quotes: PublishAmerica is NOT in any way a POD, vanity press, or subsidy publisher, and has nothing in common with them. Obviously, our authors are also not being self-published.in the most commonly used context, POD indicates "Publish On Demand", or vanity publishing. Vanity publishers charge for their "services". Some charge a few hundred dollars, others a thousand or more. We are not in that league, in any way, shape or fashion.
Evidentiary information rebutting PA claim: Authors Believe that there is no evidence of what is considered a Traditional Publishing company or what is considered a Print on Demand or POD company. I strongly disagree. There are many sources for information on this issue. One for example is found through the hyperlink below.
Http://www.sfwa.org/beware/printondemand.html
Furthermore, I received an email from Publish America where they claimed to be a POD company. A Vice President at Barnes and Noble wrote us a letter recently, saying, "We very much believe in print-on-demand (POD) technology as a cost-effective tool available for publishers to extend the range of their title offerings to Barnes & Noble... We believe that POD represents an opportunity to increase the range of titles we offer... We will continue to stock every title that you publish, which enables us to rapidly replenish our stores..." Again, these titles are available only online.
Publish America Quotes: The only area where the acronym POD comes in sight, is the printing stage of a book. Among printers, POD means print-on-demand, a digital technology that enables the printer to manufacture a book one at a time. This is in contrast with the offset technology that, by definition, must produce at least hundreds of copies of a book at a time at a minimum, but preferably thousands, to justify the expense of running the press.
Evidentiary information rebutting PA claim: Publish America uses Lightning Source as the sole printer for their product. They do not use offset technology. You can confirm this by contacting http://www.lightningsource.com/. Publish America is listed as one of their customers. Publish America also has a company called http://www.authorsmarket.net/, which is labeled itself a POD company and sends new authors to its only publishing POD company on record: Publish America.By their own admission, they are in fact a POD Company.
Dear Author,
We have much good news to share.
Publish America Quotes: PublishAmerica continues to grow faster than any other traditional publisher, and today we are apparently the most popular publisher among new authors. More than 50 new authors contact us every day, hoping to join you as a PublishAmerica author. That's more than 12,000 hopefuls per year. At least 80 percent of them never make it to the "published author" status, because they don't pass our acquisitions process, but that does not seem to discourage anyone from submitting their work to us in ever growing, and frankly astonishing, numbers. We read every single submission before we accept or refuse.
Evidentiary information rebutting PA claim: With a staff of less than one dozen how does PA read each and every manuscript? How many books would each of them have to read on a daily basis? How many acquisition editors are there? (2 or 3?) So let's put this into perspective. 2 or 3 editors at a reading rate of 50 novels a day or 12,000 per year. This means that the aquisition editors read an average of 16 novels per day. I don't know about you, but I am a graduate of Evelyn Woods and even I cannot read that fast.
Publish America Quotes: PublishAmerica is a traditional, royalty paying publisher. We are strongly opposed to charging fees, ever. There's no catch, no hidden surprises. We even pay small advances to indicate our principle. The author is never, ever, under any obligation to pull their wallet to make any purchase whatsoever. We don't want their money. We want their book. All expenses involved with acquiring, producing, manufacturing, and publishing a book, and marketing it to the industry's wholesale and distribution channels for full availability through all bookstores at home and abroad are underwritten by PublishAmerica solely. This is one of our main claims to fame, and one that we are very proud of.
Evidentiary information rebutting PA claim: Publish America pays authors a principal amount of $1.00 advance for signing a non standard 7-year contract. 8% of the first 2,000 copies sold. 10% of 8,000 copies sold and 12.5% of 10,000 copies or more sold. (It's been rumored that the average author sales per product is generally 100 books sold.) I have heard a story of one gal who had a contract with KROGER opening and potential sales errupting. She'd sold over 1,000 copies and PA dropped her immediately, before the negotiations could be finalized. You can read her posts at: Mindsight!
Author's pay no up front fees, but are encouraged through emails to purchase two products called Publicize your Book and Guerilla Marketing. They are asked to follow the instructions of those products, which specify much needed cash to promote a POD book. Furthermore, in an email sent by PA, they urge you to purchase their book. They do not charge you upfront fees but make it understood that unless you invest your own money into marketing, your book would fail. From the PA e-mail:
Dear Author,
There are books about marketing, about guerrilla marketing, about how to promote yourself, and about how to promote books, but there is no book about how to promote a published author. Those of you who regularly visit our Author Message Board may have noticed that over the course of the years many hundreds of authors have shared probably thousands of very useful tips, experiences, suggestions, and innovative ideas.
Publish America Quotes: No publisher guarantees book sales to bookstores. Major chain bookstores have no policy against stocking non-returnable books. Actually, Barnes and Noble has quadrupled the number of books they order from Publish America during the past year and we sell to them directly each and every day. Thousands, each and every month, of PublishAmerica books are sold in bookstores. Hundreds of bookstores across the nation stock our books. Bookstores will generally stock a book that they think will sell, regardless of whether it is returnable or not, and regardless of whether it is printed on digital or offset presses.
Evidentiary information rebutting PA claim: I challenge any person to go into any Barnes and Noble bookseller across the country and find an in-stock copy of a Publish America book.
Dear Ms Easton,
Thank you for your interest in having a signing at the Tattered Cover. I have looked at your web site and see that your novel is published by PUBLISH AMERICA a print-on-demand company. Unfortunately we do not do signings for print-on-demand books because of the problems inherent in
that format. I will add your book to our system so that customers will be able to order it. Thank you again for your interest. Margaret Maupin Purchasing Manager Tattered Cover.
Dear Rebecca,
Thank you for the information about your new book, Trophy Abyss. I have looked your book up in our computer system and although the ISBN does come up, it is not defined in our database and is therefore deemed non-returnable. Do you know if the book has been submitted to our Small Press Department in New York? If not, it will need to be sent in for their review and they will determine if it is something we will place in our stores. It is at that point in time that we can discuss a possible signing.
Jessie Aschbrenner, Author Relations Manager Barnes & Noble
Rebecca — I received your letter this morning inquiring into book signing events at the Borders stores in Colorado. Unfortunately, we do not host author events with print-on-demand titles where the product is non-returnable to the publisher (Publish America). Thank you for your interest in Borders, and good luck with your books. Best regards, Greg Near Area Marketing Manager, Borders Group Inc.
Publish America Quotes: All authors are treated equally here.
Evidentiary information rebutting PA claim: Authors who complain about editing or any part of the PA process are banned, slandered in e-mails and released. This is common business practice. Just check writer's forums to gather all kinds of posts that are directly from PA executives.
According to Dave Kuzminski, d.L. [email protected] there are two sets of releases for Publish America and there is no basis for judgment on who gets which release, signifying that not all authors are treated equally. Some are released because they sell too much and some because of various reasons. One only need to read writer's forum boards to understand that at best, PA deals with its authors very volotile and abusive.
Publish America Quotes: Each day, an average 65 new authors who are looking to find a book publishing company ask us to publish their book. We review not only the quality but also the genre of their work. PublishAmerica specializes in books about, for, or by people who confront a challenge in life, and who are determined to overcome it, real or imagined, fiction or nonfiction. Like all serious book-publishing companies we have to be picky as we can only accept the works that meet our requirements in both areas.
Evidentiary information rebutting PA claim: Kevin sent a mss to PA but what I did was take 30 pages and cut and paste it over and over and over till it was about a three hundred page book. And now I just wanted to say... They sent me a contract for it. Source: Kevin Yarbrough at [email protected]
"Dear Mr. Andrews:
As this is an important piece of email regarding your book, please read it completely from start to finish.
I am happy to inform you that PublishAmerica has decided to give "Eli Smith and The Purple Pony" the chance it deserves. An email will follow this one with the sample contract attached for your review. If you do not receive the email with the attached sample contract in twenty-four hours, please contact me, so I can resend the document via another method.
I will be happy to answer any questions you may have concerning the contract and to guide you through the contract negotiations phase. Please note that once you have requested that we send the official contract, we cannot further amend the contract.
Upon receiving your e-mail in acceptance with the terms, we will forward the final contract documents to you via regular mail for your signature. Along with your e-mail acceptance please include your legal name, current address, telephone number and title of work as you would like it to appear on the final contract.
The main terms of the contract are that we will pay you climbing royalties starting at 8%, you retain the copyright, and we will begin production on the book within 365 days of the date we receive the signed contract. A symbolic $1 advance underlines that all financial risk is carried by the Publisher, as we firmly believe it should be.
Once the signed contract has been processed in our offices, you will be contacted by our Production department regarding "the next step" for your book in the publishing process.
After both parties have signed the contract, you will be contacted by our production department with a list of questions and suggestions. Please feel free to e-mail any concerns or questions dealing with the terms of the contract to [email protected]. Also, please visit our web site at www.PublishAmerica.com.
Welcome to PublishAmerica, and congratulations on what promises to be an exciting time ahead.
Sincerely,
Meg Phillips
Acquisitions Editor
PublishAmerica"
Publish America Quotes: Unique among all traditional book-publishing companies, PublishAmerica counts more than 8000 happy authors. Each day, an average 5 of them ask us to also accept their next work, 25 second-book authors per week, 100 per month.By any standard, this is an amazingly high number of return authors, unseen in the rest of the book publishing company industry.
Evidentiary information rebutting PA claim: Check out These Sites to be Aware of that false fact.
Http://www.mindsightseries.com/cgi-bin/discus/discus. Cgi
http://p197. Ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm11
http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/pebp.htm
http://www.writers.net
Publish America Quotes: We assign an editor who goes through the text line by line. Let's put this in perspective. We don't touch style issues, we don't edit the author's voice, tone, or delivery. We edit for spelling, mechanics, grammar, typos, and trust us, that's a vital and time consuming job. Together, our editing staff makes more than 35,000 (!) corrections, each day, to the books they work on that day. We then send a book back to the author, up to three times, to ensure that it looks exactly as the author wants it to look. We assign a graphic designer who comes up with a unique cover design. They communicate with the authors, to hear their suggestions and ideas, so that they can be incorporated into the design. All of that takes time, and we believe that the authors WANT it to take time. After all, this is their life's work. They want it to be treated accordingly. They want time control, they want quality over hurry. We assure them both.
Evidentiary information rebutting PA claim: Publish America Standard New Author Contract Paragraph 13: The publisher shall furnish the Author with an electronic page proof of the work which conforms to the completed manuscript as submitted by the author. The author agrees to return such proof to the publisher with his (grammar and/or spelling and/or typo and/or non-substantial editing) corrections within (15) days of the receipt thereof by him. The cost of alterations in the page proof required by the author other than corrections of the Publisher's errors, in excess of 15% of the original cost of composition shall be charged against the earnings of the Author under this agreement
Publish America Quotes: PublishAmerica is only interested in a book's publishing rights. We don't want any other rights, unless an author insists that we carry them on his/her behalf. Movie rights, audio rights, TV rights, merchandising rights, the copyright, they all remain the author's. We are a BOOK publisher, the only way we earn our money is by selling books, and we're very good at that. Everything else can be done better by others. Our contracts expire after seven years, unlike the life term that most other traditional publishers require. Maybe that's one of the reasons why our contracts seem to be particularly liked by lawyers: we count a few hundred attorneys among our authors.
Evidentiary information rebutting PA claim: Publish America Standard New Author Contract Paragraph 20: Author hereby agrees that the Publisher shall have the exclusive right for the duration of this agreement to negotiate for the sale, lease, license, or other disposition of the said literary work in the motion picture, dramatic, radio, television, and/or all other fields Publish America's profit from the sale to any of above listed entities50%.
Publish America Released my novel (via Paragraph 24 of the contract which states: 24. When in the judgement of the Publisher, the public demand for the work is no longer sufficient to warrant its continued manufacture, the Publisher may discontinue further manufacture and destroy any or all plates, books, sheets and electronic files without any liability in connection therewith to the Author. However, the Publisher agrees to notify the Author of such decision in writing, and will offer to transfer to the Author the work and its rights in the copyrights thereon, the plates (if any), the bound copies and sheet stock (if any) on the following terms F.O.B. Point of shipment: the plates, at their value for old metal, the engravings (to be used only in the work) at one-half (1/2) their original cost, the bound stock at one-half (1/2) the list price, and the sheet stock at the cost of gathering, folding, sewing and preparing for shipment, all without royalties.in the latter event, unless the Author shall, within 30 days, accept said offer and pay the amount set forth in said writing, the Publisher may dispose of the work, copyrights, plates, books, sheets and other property without further liability for royalties or otherwise.) Then I received a letter specifying "Publishing Relationship has been Terminated."
Then for two months PA continued to sell several copies of my product on their web site and obtain profits. I have not to date seen royalties or profit from those sales.in a letter I sent via certified mail to the Support Team about this issue, they sent the response: (After writing your office initally PA eliminated the novel from their site, but continue to place it in their catalog for sale through online booksellers.)
Ms. Easton,
Please address future correspondence to [email protected]. Future
letters addressed to individuals within the company will not be considered. We ignore all of your demands and deadlines. We will consider your request at our next review meeting, to be held at our pleasure, probably within the next month or so.
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