Dee, thank you for posting that columnist's piece as well as the contact information for the editors. Here is what I sent:
Dear Editor,
This column is just awful!
First, it is written as an infomercial rather than a column. It's nothing more than a I-wrote-this-book-and-I-have-this-platform-to-tell-you-to-buy-it. Is that really what you consider read-worthy? I can't believe it is unless you are one of those ad rags most of us fill our recycle cans with. Second, if you aren't aware that PublishAmerica is a crook and a scam sucking in uwary and unsophisticated writers ... well, you need to get out more.
Absolute Write has a 600-page discussion thread going on PA with links to numerous reliable sites, a number of professional writers who also give of their time and expertise as author advocates, a great deal of negative media publicity including the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, a New York newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, several television stations and more. Even that bastion of inertia, the BBB, was finally moved to get off its *** and change the rating from "favorable" to "investigating."
You have done your readers an enormous disfavor not only by allowing an advertisement to run as editorial space but by giving credence to a scamming operation that depends on psychological abuse, cheating, lying and censorship tactics to keep its "happy" authors in line.
Drown will find this out soon enough. He deserves what's coming. But to smear your own publication by allowing a "columnist" to join up in roping in more victims is despicable.