PublishAmerica's stock image covers

All PA books show up at all the big online sites like Amazon, B&N and Powells. If you'll look at the back of a PA book (or almost any book) you'll see that the book barcode is a little different than the barcode on your ketchup. That's called an ISBN (International Standard Book Number). Anyone can get one for about $30--you fill out a form giving basic info about your book and submit it to a clearinghouse. PA pays much less, because they do hundreds at a time.

The big bookstore sites are all tied into the ISBN database, and hence your book will show up there. If they don't have an agreement with PA's wholesaler, then the book will show as out of stock. But again, all the big sites do work with PA's wholesaler.

So if a vanity press tells you that your book will be "available" to all the big booksellers, don't be impressed. All self-published books can be available to all those sites. But no one will find your book if they don't know to look for it, and most of these books have little or no sales.

where did you get receipts from. I mean i have seen like used copies on B@N and amazon and other places of my book, which means it was sold, I just didnt get that money at all, i see where my book is India and shipping from india. It didnt fly over there for free, but i didnt gett any money for it in sept. I would like to have my rights back to my book, all that hard work I put in it. they were rude to you? what did they say?

Dont i know, i sold like 4 or 5 from amazon during the last 6 months, two of them are showing as used for 54.00. and then 1 used at B@N and 3 I think at booksamillion. but I got no money. Should I print this off and send it to PA and tell them where is the money. thank you for telling me about Powells. will check there now. you should check ABEBOOKs.com. They show alot of our books there and that they ship from another country. theydidnt fly there.

wanda4545 said:

where did you get receipts from. I mean i have seen like used copies on B@N and amazon and other places of my book, which means it was sold, I just didnt get that money at all, i see where my book is India and shipping from india. It didnt fly over there for free, but i didnt gett any money for it in sept. I would like to have my rights back to my book, all that hard work I put in it. they were rude to you? what did they say?

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I have copies of receipts where other's bought my book. When the royalty check arrived, PA clearly showed they had given a 55% discount on those sales, yet the receipts I have show that the discount was only 10%.

Any time you question PA in anything they do, they are reknowned for rude and snarky replies, trying to make you feel as if everything wrong with your book is your fault, and they did nothing wrong. Needless to say, I had more questions than they ever intended to answer so instead of giving me informative replies, I got rude ones that had nothing at all to do with the questions I asked.

Basically, I told them that whether or not they answered my questions was really okay, because I intended to find out the answers. Since they couldn't or wouldn't answer my questions and I wasn't buying any books, they returned my rights to me and dissolved the contract.

Unimportant said:

Wanda, a lot of the places where you'll see your books advertised for sale don't actually own a copy of your book. They are going on the assumption that if a reader does order a copy from them, they can buy a copy from the publisher and sell it on to the reader at a profit. That's why you see the book listed at prices like $54. Same for those ads in countries other than the USA. The physical copies of the book don't really exist yet.

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Although this is correct 90% of the time, I've found more than a few copies of my book that were listed at $50 or more, where the seller had an actual copy. One even has a signed copy and is trying to sell it for just over $50. I just emailed the sellers and asked them if they had a copy or if they were just listing the book in hopes of gaining a sale. The odds are good that any listing you see is only a listing because print on demand books aren't printed until ordered, but occasionally you will find someone who has a copy to sell. At least that is what I have discovered. Of the people I emailed and asked whether or not they had copies of my book, those who did replied to my email, some didn't reply at all but took the book listing off their website, and others ignored my email altogether and still show the book for sale in both new and used copies.

Wow, that southern one wasn't even trying. Off the top of my head I can think of five images that would evoke a feeling of being in the south. A dirt road isn't one of them.

scully931 said:

Wow, that southern one wasn't even trying. Off the top of my head I can think of five images that would evoke a feeling of being in the south. A dirt road isn't one of them.

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Least of all a dirt road in a flat, grassy plain that looks like somewhere in Kansas. Even the parts of the south that are flat don't look like that, and where are the trees? Sheesh.

Queen of Swords said:

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Hey, now, that's hard work, adjusting the color settings in Photoshop!

Hey now, be nice! The purple one added a drop!

Cyia said:

Hey now, be nice! The purple one added a drop!

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And is off center. That took some doing.

And they repositioned the other two at different heights.

Actually, I like the cover for Soul Drops.

can you find my cover where they used it before.

wanda4545 said:

can you find my cover where they used it before.

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Not all of the covers have been reused.

oh my god you mean that I might have a book with the only cover not ever used. That's really something.

I'm not sure how Queen does this, actually. With 40,000 odd books out there, there's no way I could remember which ones have been reused. It's like a game of concentration with 40,000 tiles!

I dont know how she does it either, but she's finding alot of them

I know these images are public domain, but doesn't that only mean people can use them for free? Jupiter still could sue PA for using them for profit, right?

cethklein said:

I know these images are public domain, but doesn't that only mean people can use them for free? Jupiter still could sue PA for using them for profit, right?

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No, they're not public domain. They're royalty free. PA pays a small subscription fee, IIRC, which entitles them to use the picture bank for their covers.

And, there are definite cases of people with unique covers. "Marketing guy" was one - a friend of his made the cover - and there's another young man who posts here who happened to get a composite cover during the tenure of one of the real artists at PA (someone who thought their job was to create a cover rather than slap on an image - she did several nice ones).

The point isn't just that images are reused, but that the people who sign with PA are usually under the impression that their cover is designed specifically for their story by someone with working knowledge of it. It's not. The image is yanked from a bank of pictures based on the title and parts of a questionnaire.

That's why you get complaints (which are quickly sent to the corn field) from people who have characters with a specific look, but the cover doesn't reflect it. One man needed a specific color cat for his kids book, but they used the wrong color, that kind of thing. Or you might get someone who didn't check the difference between an American western windmill and a Dutch one for a romance set in 1918 Kansas. These are things real publishers would usually check on.

How about the person who had the book about Ghandi who got the picture of the Native American bodybuilder?

James D. Macdonald said:

Remember, the author didn't want that cover -- she just genned something up fast to show them what she meant, so that the crack team of PA Artists could create a cover.

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How about the one you were referencing here, where they used the cover mockup she sent instead of following her suggestion to design something similar?

Seems the PA way of getting artwork done is more than a tad unprofessional.