I first heard about PublishAmerica while having dinner with a friend in late 2001 or early 2002. He told us he'd sold a novel; he was published as a scholar, but this was his first time as a novelist. We could see his excitement as he told us the publisher was "very Internet savvy," and had said that they'd see his book got into traditional bookstores and well as being available on the 'net. I'd never heard of the publisher, which was unusual given how much time I'd spent at libraries, book stores, and ALA and ABA conventions, but I didn't worry about it then.
Several months later we received a disturbingly amateur letter from PublishAmerica inviting us to buy a copy of our friend's novel. I knew then they weren't a legitimate publisher; the language on the order form and cover letter made it very clear that PublishAmerica was a printer, and I suspected, a poor one, judging by the odd syntax and blurred type on the letter and order form. Even the price of the book was odd. The order form price was $21.95, a hardcover price for a slender trade paperback.
Skip forward to Con José, the 2002 World Science Fiction convention. A fannish acquaintance showed me a table where her book was on sale by consignment. It was a thinnish trade paperback, for just under $20.00. The cover was a bit odd looking; it was obviously stock footage, but the bleed was wrong and the colors weren't quite right. When I looked at the text my heart sank. There were lots of very basic errors, things like confusion between its and it's, confusion between possessives and plurals, "would of" instead of "would have," lines of text repeated at the bottom of one page and again at the top of the next, outright spelling errors . . . The typography was so awful that it was difficult to read the text. Lines were frequently dropped, resulting in short pages, and the text had so many rivers it was hard to read an entire page. The publisher made no effort to kern; none at all. There were reversed and unmatched quotation marks, broken ellipses . . . it was bad.
But worse than the amateur typesetting, proofreading and design, was the fact that the book desperately needed an editor, a real editor, someone who would have spotted the continuity problems, like the character whose name was spelled differently at different points, and the time and date problems. It was pretty clear that someone had performed crude formatting and made a token effort to proof read, probably relying on spell check, but mostly dealing with formatting issues. It also appeared that the formatter was someone who liked commas, I mean really liked commas, and thought every sentence needed one, or three. My acquaintance said that yes, there were commas introduced spontaneously, and some other errors, but PublishAmerica explained that the printer had introduced them and they would be corrected if the book sold well enough.
The errors I spotted were not introduced in the digital printing process, since digital printing relies on a digital file provided by a publisher. The book had not been professionally edited, copy edited, or proofed. It looked to me like the book was a straight dump from Microsoft Word to .pdf. I've subsequently learned from other PublishAmerica authors that my fannish acquaintance was lucky; others have had even more serious errors introduced into the ms. These are not the actions of a professional publisher with genuine editorial expertise. Having seen one of PublishAmerica's ads for editors, I'm not surprised. I hate to think what those poor people are paid; probably nothing like the industry standard, and given the number of books PublishAmerica prints a week, I suspect that there's more emphasis on meeting a quota than producing clean text.
My acquaintance was suckered into buying a number of copies herself, to sell. She said she had more luck selling the books at cons than at book stores. This makes perfect sense to me now. I didn't know why most bookstores will not stock PublishAmerica books then, I just felt bad for her. Now, I know it's because PublishAmerica, unlike a genuine publisher, does not accept returns from bookstores. Most publishers allow refundable returns of books that do not sell. This is standard industry wide, and worldwide, and has been for far longer than I've been alive. Since most books are still sold in stores, right off the bat, writers under PublishAmerica's standard seven year contract have limited their audience. Like most POD services, PublishAmerica does not include LOC CIP information in their books, which many libraries require before purchasing a book. That's probably why I can't find a single book from PublishAmerica in any of the UCLA libraries. They don't even publish a catalog, and the copy on the PublishAmerica web site is a nightmare. This is not a publisher that is serious about quality books, or about selling books to the general public; their customers are their authors.
I was reminded of PublishAmerica recently by a post from Teresa Nielsen Hayden's on A brief note on linguistic markers, about the linguistic warning signs that a printer or vanity press is masquerading as a publisher, or, more often than not, is a scammer. Teresa Nielsen Hayden is an editor at Tor, a publisher known especially for high quality science fiction and fantasy. Ms. Hayden knows books, she knows writing, and most especially, she knows publishing. Her post led me to AbsoluteWrite, a writer's advocacy and community site, where there's a fascinating discussion about PublishAmerica. I did some Googling, and noticed that the press releases for two different authors were essentially identical; both used the astonishingly vile phrases "resonate with an audience" and "fits our specialty like a glove." I Googled the name of the PublishAmerica "Editorial Director," and the phrase "resonate with an audience." You can see the Google results yourself. PublishAmerica has no shame.
The Absolute Write forum in turn led me to a story about PublishAmerica byThe Washington Post here. You should note that Paula Span, in addition to being a sixteen year veteran of the Post, is a faculty member of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She's a professional, and she did her research. The Associated Press also ran a story about PublishAmerica, written by Hillel Italie, a journalist who is quite familiar with publishing, and who, like Paula Span, did his homework.
PublishAmerica is not a company you want to trust with your book. They don't really edit, they don't market (other than sending order requests to your friends), they don't have a catalog, they don't pay to register copyright (they charge you $30.00). If you truly want to self-publish, which is really what you are doing with PublishAmerica, since they're really just a go-between, performing some crude re-formatting, and then sending .pdf files to their printer, Lightning Source, why not go directly to Lightning Source, or use Lulu.com (who will even provide you with as ISBN for a fee), and allow you control the rights to your book, or even patronize your local print shop?
Speaking of Lulu, as part of an effort to educate themselves and the public about the shoddy practices of PublishAmerica, a group of professional writers submitted a truly unpublishable ms. to PublishAmerica. Now, this was a ms. by professionals, people who make a living from the written word, as writers, and editors, and more than one has clearly been exposed to the slush pile. Their novel Atlanta Nights by Travis Tea truly is unpublishable, and it's almost unreadable. But it is very, very funny. PublishAmerica accepted Atlanta Nights for publication, proof that they'll take anything (though when the hoax became public, PublishAmerica retracted their offer). Atlanta Nights is not, by the way, the first or the only fake ms. PublishAmerica has accepted for publication without reading the ms. or noticing it was a fake. The authors, having made their point, gave in to popular demand, and have published Atlanta Nights through Lulu.com. You can read reviews or buy your own copy of Atlanta Nights here. Proceeds will benefit the SFWA emergency medical fund.
N.B. The fact that PublishAmerica will eagerly accept crap, does not mean that all the books they accept are crap, but it does show that not only do they not edit their books, they don't even read them.
In any case, if you are an aspiring writer, these are good sources about writing and publishing (RSS feed) with a legitimate publisher. Here are some links to follow if you're still curious about the exceedingly shady operations of PublishAmerica (RSS feed).