I was just informed that a company called instabook is suing PA for patent infringment. They want all of PA's profits and a whole bunch more. Needless to say, if instabook wins, PA will be pennyless. Out of business.
Hmmm . . . details here if you have a Pacer subscription.I was just informed that a company called instabook is suing PA for patent infringment. They want all of PA's profits and a whole bunch more. Needless to say, if instabook wins, PA will be pennyless. Out of business.
Frank Zollo Productions has offered Victoria Winslow, author of Reality of You a movie deal. In addition to being credited as the film's screenwriter, Ms. Winslow will also work as one of the film's producers.
On PA's front page:
One of the producers? Doesn't that mean that she has to put up the money? Is this vanity film making (to go along with the vanity publishing)?
Other than this film deal with Victoria Winslow there is no mention of Frank Zollo Productions anywhere on the Google-indexed web.
This looks like yet another hollow victory for PA in their never-ending search for Hollywood respectability.
I've seen some posts where people have gotten the same letter, but not four years after their submission!I posted a while back that this site and P&E saved me from PA. I'd like to mention something that I'd forgotten at the time.
Sometime, shortly after I'd finished my MS, I recieved a letter in the mail from PA. It said something along the lines of "You contacted us about your manuscript, but we never recieved it. Please submit it to us so it can get the chance it deserves." (Paraphrasing, of course. I threw the letter out after finding P&E.)
I'd completely forgotten that when I was in middle school I'd done a search for "book publishers" and pulled up PA's site. I sent in a breif description of the book I had been working on (which is now in my "never to be seen or spoken of" drawer). The letter is what got me into researching them again.
It took them over four years to send that letter. Hmm... Maybe they were beginning to run low on fresh meat.
I've seen some posts where people have gotten the same letter, but not four years after their submission!
...And BTW, attacking the employees who prepare and sign contracts is a total waste of time.
They are authorized to do so per their employee contract.
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Avoid stigma of paying a publisher! We want your book, not your money.
www.publishamerica.com
With a few years to go on the contract, my main question has no longer become "How can I make these books sell?" but rather if I should even mention I have books with PA in print when querying an agent.
If anyone knows an escape clause so I can have my rights back, I'm all ears.
Alas, PA began as flat-out vanity operation Erica House (named after the founder's wife). From there, it morphed into AmErica House, then PublishAmerica: each step further sugar-coating their business model under another layer of "we'll give you the chance you deserve!" hype.As I have a little bit of King Arthur buried deep within me; I'd like to think the guy over at PA started with honest intentions and that once they had 100 authors and POD press and realized they couldn't get their books into stores they started trying to save their company and began selling primarily to their own authors.
It has been a vanity press right from the start, as near as I can tell. PA has developed some especially deceptive methods, but it is nonetheless just a vanity press. (Sometimes it gets its hands on good books despite that.) Vanity presses, like commercial weight-loss diet schemes and any other endeavor that appeals to gullibility, depend on deception.. . .I'd like to think the guy over at PA started with honest intentions and that once they had 100 authors and POD press and realized they couldn't get their books into stores they started trying to save their company and began selling primarily to their own authors. . . . .
Then, before that first book was even ready for sale, I was submitting the second. Yes, that's right, two contracts.