THEMISATHENA.INFO: Crack of Death

Imagine you're a budding writer, eager to finally see your first novel published. Imagine you've put every spare second into that book; checking your sources, giving it your best writerly go, tweaking and trimming it, and finally, showing it around among your family and friends, who unanimously profess themselves dazzled with your hitherto unknown literary talent. Then imagine receiving rejection letter upon rejection letter from publishers to whom you have submitted your manuscript. Imagine you are growing more and more desperate; not only because of the number of recejctions as such but also because many of them are form letters, and even if they are not, they either offer no clues at all as to the reasons for the rejection, or they tell you in no uncertain terms that your oeuvre simply is not, and never will be, up to publication standards.

Then imagine coming across the website of "the number one book publisher" of the United States, a company which even claims to have made the Guinness Book of Records for "holding the largest book signing in world history."

"We are always happy when a new author finds his or her way to our door – opportunity knocks on both sides! If you are an author who is determined to see your manuscript become a book, perhaps PublishAmerica is the publisher for which you've been searching,"

"If you are interested in becoming a PublishAmerica author, please click Here and tell us about your work. Your submitted manuscript will be reviewed by our skilled and thorough Acquisitions staff, who will determine whether or not your work has what it takes to be a PublishAmerica book,"

You decide to give it one last go. If your manuscript is rejected again, then it's obviously not meant to be – you're not going to be a published author, ever. At this point you're pretty convinced that this is exactly what's going to happen anyway, but you've looked at all the testimonials of happy authors, and the website really does make it sound as if the people behind it had a more welcoming and open-minded attitude than all of those other publishing houses you've already tried. "No other traditional book publisher puts as many new titles in print, every day," they even promise.

Nevertheless, finally hitting the "send" button of your email to their acquisitions department brings up the painful memory of handing in that one exam paper you absolutely had to pass in school: it makes you feel as if steel bands were constricting your heart and lungs.

Over the next couple of days, you get into the habit of checking your mail box only if someone tells you over the phone they've sent you something nice. You tell yourself that since your manuscript is going to be rejected again anyway, it doesn't really matter how soon you find out. In fact, you'd really rather not know for sure at all.

Then the unbelievable happens: They've decided to accept your manuscript, and they send you a contract. You're going to be a published author after all! You quickly sign, fearing that if you delay, their message will somehow morph into another rejection. You keep a copy of the contract, and an extra copy of the signature page, which you put into a frame and hang it up on your living room wall.

With baited breath you wait for the first orders of your book. Surely there will be a book tour soon? Press events? Interviews and reviews by major newspapers, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, or Booklist? Maybe even something on TV or radio?

But nothing happens. You double check your contract, find that you don't really understand what it says about promotion, and turn to your publisher for information. "Nothing is better for a book than a proactive author. The more an author does to promote their book, the more success they will find," they tell you. In other words: Get out there and do it yourself. You could start by buying a few copies of your own work and resell those, they go on to suggest. After all, you'll get the purchase price back from your buyers, and on top of that you'll get the royalties for each sale! – So you try to be proactive and market your own book, even though it seems hardly fair to you to have to do this in the first place, and then to even have to purchase your own books at a barely-discounted price. But you soon find out that you're not exactly a born salesperson: those few souls who eventually do purchase your book quite obviously do so only out of pity, and even they only come around after you've given them the kind of discount you feel you should have received from your publisher. Besides, what about the media and major chain bookstores, you wonder – how are you ever going to get them to notice you?

Your local bookstore firmly turns you down for a book signing event, on the grounds that they "don't do book signings with self-published authors." When you protest that you aren't self-published, the manager cuts you short: "Of course you are. PublishAmerica is a POD mill." He randomly opens the copy of your book that you have brought and points out a few rather glaring spelling and grammatical errors which, shamefacedly, you yourself notice only now as well: "Do you think a single editor at a mainstream publishing company would keep their job if they let this kind of stuff slip through the cracks?" he asks.

At other stores, you quickly make the same experience. And as for the news media ... you don't know any journalists at all, let alone any journalists who would work for a truly influential paper (or radio or TV station). You submit a reader's comment to your daily newspaper, and to a few other papers as well, but those letters aren't even printed. Finally someone explains the terms of your contract to you, and you find out that not only is your publisher under no obligation at all to do any marketing on your behalf, or to ensure that your books are present on the shelves of so much as a single store; you also won't be able to sign a contract with any other publisher for the next seven years, nor can you publish your book electronically (or abroad, even if that means having it translated first).

"Oh, and by the way," your friend then adds, "have you submitted your book with the U.S. Copyright Office yet? If not, you may want to double check whether your publisher did, you know. I'm not sure if I get this right, but it sounds as if they weren't under any obligation to do that, either."

"But they've printed a copyright notice!" You take a book from the stack of as-yet unsold copies, fresh off the press and smelling like it, too. (There used to be a time when you loved that smell – recently you've come to loathe it.) You open the book (the cover cracks a bit like only those of unread books will), you turn to the front matter page and point your finger: "See?"

"Yes," your friend patiently agrees. "But under your contract, this may really be all they're obliged to do. And as long as nobody has actually registered your book with the copyright office, this notice alone unfortunately doesn't guarantee that nobody else can go and steal any and all of your stuff and get away with it clean."

Not that anyone would be greatly tempted to steal any of it in the first place: You're sure it's mere kindness that makes him refrain from vocalizing what you yourself can no longer truly deny, either. You decide to shelve your writerly ambitions for good – so it was not meant to be, after all. It's like that big exam in school; you failed that one, too, dropped out, and just look at you now.

A few weeks later you receive another letter from your publisher. Ah yes, royalties, you'd almost forgotten about those already. Well, maybe they'll at least yield a night at the movies, or dinner at a nice restaurant somewhere. That new Italian place for example ...

But, no. You're lucky if you can buy a single movie ticket with that check. But how can this be? There's an accounting alright, and it does show the same amount as is printed on the check, but shouldn't you be entitled to much, much more, even for the few books you bought and sold on your own? One last time you dig out your contract – the copy of its signature page has long since vanished from your living room wall – and again you find that you can't make sense of its terms. Only by this time, you're too ashamed to go back to your friend and ask him again, and too disillusioned with your publisher to remonstrate with them. You go to that new Italian place anyway, buy a bottle of the cheapest red wine they have on their menu, then another one when you've finished the first bottle, and you barely make it home again afterwards.

Sharla Tann and "Crack of Death"

In late 2006, PublishAmerica – the publisher from whose website the comments quoted above are taken verbatim – received the following email from an author calling herself Sharla Tann:

"I'm a country girl at heart, being born and raised in a poor rural area of Montana. My parents uprooted us when we were young and we moved to Phoenix in search of employment. I was not popular at the new school so I amused me making up stories in my head about being back in my old home town. Later I wrote them down.

I had a short marriage to a man in the Navy, but he ran around on me and finally divorced me and married the slut. We are now divorced, with no children, which is a blessing. A failed marriage would be a terrible burden to have on a child.

Many temporary jobs have employed me since the divorce. I was working part time recently and it gave me time to write my first novel. A romantic thriller in an exotic country I have never visited but would like to some day. England has always been fascinating for me. I researched real hard to get the details and the slang right for my heroine.

My heroine Nancy experiences the thrilling excitement that has escaped my life and she will carry that thrill to others I am sure. Since drugs are a big problem nowadays she is trapped in the drug trade big time and is only rescued by the skin of her teeth and the hero.

I am now working at a good job in a call center for a big credit card company now and my dream continues - I want to be a author with a published book. While writing, it is so hard to get published. I was rejected by agents and publishers because it is my first novel. When I saw the Publish America advertisement on an article about getting published it was really like an answer to my prayers from Heaven. Being that so few publishers are willing to give a new writer the time of day or a chance.

I would really like to use my childhood maiden name, Tann, for when you publish my romantic thriller. I don't want to use my exe's name. If he divorced me his name doesn't deserve to be on a published romantic thriller. I will be going to court soon to change my name back to my maiden name."

Attached to the email was the manuscript for a novel called "Crack of Death," whose contents Sharla herself has since summed up like this:

"This exciting erotic thriller fiction novel is the emotional, spine-chilling story of the beautiful hairdresser Nancy whose life spirals out of control when she meets an exotic, Latino hunk. Little does Audrey know, that Roberto is in fact a dangerous Colombian Mafia Drug Barren. Can she escape the clutches of Cucaracha, Espadrillo (aka The Wedgie) and, their Boss the wicked La Madre? From the seething underbelly of Colombian drugs to the evil web of intrigue in London, Nancy is swept up in swirling mail-storm of lust drugs and bloodshed that will change her life if she escapes with it forever right up to the cliffhanger ending where the kindly dashing Scotland Yard detective Garry Lamont crosses swords with intrepid FBI agent Duane Malaysia for her life and love. But is it too late?......."

As a matter of fact, the book is a case study in abominable prose: it contains every conceivable writerly sin from tense switches, spelling and grammar errors, homophones, malapropisms and overwriting to telling not showing, passive tense, a plethora of well-worn clichés, head-hopping, point of view changes galore, long, rambling, verbless sentences whose ending doesn't match their beginning, grossly stereotypical or plainly unrealistic characters, plot cul-de-sacs and inconsistencies, such as characters changing name/sex/age for no reason whatsoever and characters left dangling after a cliff-hanger chapter ending, boring descriptions and listing of facts (contrasted by gratuitously graphic sex and violence), wooden, clunky dialogue, and generally speaking, every literary howler under the sun.

But, you've guessed it ... PublishAmerica's acquisitions department found that "Crack of Death" very much had "what it takes to be a PublishAmerica book," and they rushed out a contract to li'l old Sharla ASAP.

Now, what they obviously missed (even though the author's name itself should have clued them in big time) was that Sharla is a sister-in-spirit to Travis Tea, who in early 2005 submitted the gloriously awful "Atlanta Nights," which has long since garnered a much-deserved publishing reputation in its own right. Initially, "Crack of Death" was intended to be submitted to PublishBritannica, PublishAmerica's Britain-bound outlet. (Since they never actually had brick-and-mortar headquarters in the United Kingdom, only a printing facility and a mirror website tailored to the British public, one can hardly call them a British "subsidiary" or anything equally respectable.) That plan, however, fell through when the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica did the job for Sharla's creators and sued, based on infringement of the "Britannica" element in its name. Encyclopedia Britannica won, and the authors decided to direct their efforts at PublishAmerica itself, which had, after all, managed to survive the onslaught of Travis's "Atlanta Nights," and even boasts on the "About Us" page of its website that "[n]ow in its sixth year of steady growth, PublishAmerica serves more than twenty thousand authors. It specializes in books about, or by, people who face and overcome hardships and obstacles in life (both fictional and nonfictional), and who turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones. Among their list of titles there are many genuine gems of high literary quality, which has been recognized by professional reviewers in literally thousands of reviews."

PublishAmerica

Well, if you read the the insider accounts of some folks who actually worked at PublishAmerica, it's hardly surprising that Sharla's opus was accepted as seamlessly as Travis's: According to them, the allegedly "skilled and thorough Acquisitions staff" in fact has nary an advanced degree in English literature or any comparable discipline to show for, they're given double-digit quotas how many books to accept per day, and rejections can only be based on the fact that the work is either shorter than 8500 words, that its author is not yet sixteen years old, or that the work contains blatant copyright violations such as entire passages copied and pasted from a prepublished work. Any- and everything else, including any and all oeuvres containing the writerly sins purposely committed in "Crack of Death," will pass the muster of the company's "skilled and thorough Acquisitions staff" with flying colors. (Indeed, if an editor has enough of a conscience to actually suggest the rejection of a given manuscript on quality grounds, he or she is routinely overruled by the company's executeive director herself.)

So why does all this matter, you may wonder? After all, POD ("print-on-demand") and vanity presses are a common enough feature in the publishing world of this day and age, so why pick on PublishAmerica in particular?

Simple: because PublishAmerica claims not to be a vanity press or a POD business but a "traditional" publisher. However:

• No "traditional" publisher worth its salt will print a book without careful proofreading and editorial review at least for obvious spelling and grammar errors, if for nothing else.

• No "traditional" publishing house worth its salt would make it impossible for an author to change publishers for as long as seven years: Depending on the market in which you're moving (and unless you are in the league of the Stephen Kings and J.K. Rowlings of this world), you either get a one-, two- or three-book contact, which may or may not have an option for any extensions, and which in any event leaves ample room for both sides to decide whether they are happy to continue their contractual relationship.

• Any "traditional" publishing house worth its salt will understand that marketing is in their own best interest, and won't make it incumbent on the author to take care of this side of the business themselves from the start. (This doesn't mean that no author has ever any reasons to complain about their publishers' marketing efforts, but it still takes considerable editorial gall to flat-out tell an author to purchase their own books and sell them on their own.) By the same token, any "traditional" publishing house worth its salt will make sure that "bookstore availability" actually means shelf presence, not just the possibility to place an order.

• Any "traditional" publishing house worth its salt will consent to part with between 10 and 25 free author's copies of a given book.

• Any "traditional" publishing house worth its salt will, at least with regard to works of fiction, agree to give the author a substantial discount for extra copies they purchase over and above the number of their free copies.

• Any "traditional" publishing house worth its salt will make sure they're paying fair, market level royalties.

• No "traditional" publishing house worth its salt will reserve for themselves exclusive publication rights they are not actually equipped to handle, such as electronic publication, translations, and foreign rights.

• And last but not least: no "traditional" publishing house worth its salt will leave the author in the dark about the status of the work's copyright protection; rather, they will ensure on their own that full and proper protection is guaranteed (or if any additional documents are to be filed by the author at all, they will at the very least provide the necessary paperwork and instructions how to submit it).

By the same token, with a run-of-the-mill vanity press or POD publisher, you know that you're not buying the reputation that comes with the name of a well-established mainstream publishing house. You know that you'll have to do your own marketing, and that books will only be printed whenever an actual purchase is made. (Hence, after all, the name.) You know that there is no quality control. You know that you yourself have to take care of any and all copyright issues. You know that short of a miracle, your book will not become the next "Harry Potter" or "Lord of the Rings."

But by claiming that they are not a POD publisher or vanity press, that any and all submissions will undergo the rigorous scrutiny of their "skilled and thorough Acquisitions staff," and that they even "specialize in books about, or by, people who face and overcome hardships and obstacles in life ... and who turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones," PublishAmerica is praying on the hopes and dreams of all those who, for whatever reasons, have found it hard to submit their works with established mainstream publishers. And no: I'm not one of them; I currently don't even live in a country from which PublishAmerica accepts manuscript submissions, and in any event, I fortunately heard the true story about this company before I could ever have been tempted to try and publish anything with them myself. But according to their own "Facts and Figures" page, 30,000 people annually are tempted to do just that; and the stories of their experience, one and all, read much like the one outlined above. And frankly, I find it equally shameful to, on the one hand, exploit the futile hopes of those whose works have, unfortunately, rightly been rejected by other publishers, and to also make it impossible, on the other hand, for those who perhaps simply are not yet good enough to produce something publishable to switch to another publisher once their learning curve is complete. Therefore, I was happy enough to contribute to the project when one of its initiators asked me whether I would be interested.

For the record, the full list of contributors includes Sharon Maas, Lady of Prose, Lucia Bibiloni, Bufty, Modesta, The NavigatorX, Greg Ballan, Dee Skies, Roger Morris, Sheryl Nantus, James D. Macdonald, Catherine O'Mahony, Dawno, Chris Tricerotops Stevenson, Robin Folks, Mary Hinge, Aconite, Jane Smith, Christine Norris, Raymond K. Wong, and yours truly. Sharla Tann's author biography was written by Tsu Dho Nimh. By visiting the "Crack of Death" website, you can either download a free copy of the manuscript, or you can purchase it from Lulu.com (a true and genuine vanity press that doesn't pretend to be anything else). All proceeds of purchases go to AbsoluteWrite.com, a tremendously informative website featuring a multitude of tips, hints, and other resources for beginning and established writers alike.

She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply say I am without adding a this, or a that, without saying I am Indian, Guyanese, English, or anything else in the world. Sharon Maas: Of Marriageable Age.

Through our maps, we willingly become a part of their boundaries. If our home is included, we feel pride, perhaps familiarity, but always a sense that this is ours. If it is not, we accept our roles as outsiders, though we may be of the same mind and culture. In this way, maps can be dangerous and powerful tools. Debbie Lee Wesselmann: Trutor and the Balloonist.

I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. ... All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps. Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient.

Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me. Hugo Hamilton: The Speckled People.

Crack of Death

It could happen to you ...

Sharla Tann and "Crack of Death"

PublishAmerica