The Wrong Road to Being Published
By Teresa Black
My personal story.
I was going down the road to nowhere, although at the time I wasn’t aware that was where the road was leading. It was a bright sunny day, and I had finally finished the chores for the day. I was exhausted and still had dinner to cook. Instead of turning on the television, I wandered upstairs for what seemed like the fiftieth time that day to my computer.
I debated whether to turn the light on over the computer. The lone window in the room now faced away from the sun as it began to set in the sky, its rays turned pink in the few clouds that still remained. Deciding to do without the light, I booted the computer and went online to check my email.
Being a military dependent with a spouse who stayed at work or gone on temporary duty most of the time left a lot of work for me to do. For almost two of those years I had struggled to be a Mom, take care of a home, run all the errands make every appointment, work a part-time job, and still find the time and money to take a writing course. The need to work full time was overshadowed by the amount of other things I had to do every day. It had taken many nights without sleep in order to get my assignments finished, but I had persevered. I had written my assignments all along building characters, and using those same characters, I wrote a novel.
My one unfulfilled quest along this road had been to find an agent to represent my work. I had breezed through my writing course, but found it difficult to take an almost three-hundred page manuscript and turn it into a few eye catching sentences. I had changed my query letter a dozen times or more and sent it out to different agents all over the country. Most received form rejection letters and the few who had asked for sample chapters had replied personally. All but one of the three that had sent personal letters told me that my book, although very interesting and written well, didn’t suit what they were looking for at that time. One agent even told me that I should try back with them in a year or so if I hadn’t found representation by then. I was hyped really because to me it meant that my book was good and might have a chance in the publishing industry.
It’s interesting what sorts of email one person can get in a days time, but I scrolled through the seventy messages anyway. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find there but for some reason I was determined to scroll through the whole bunch. About three fourths of the way through those messages I noticed one from a literary agency. I had forgotten all about one query letter that I had put my email address on. I remember now, thinking back on it, that I had put the email address there to make an agents rejection to me faster. That would let me get the next query letter sent to another agent sooner.
Reluctantly I opened the email and began reading it. This agent wanted my full manuscript. Her exact words in the email said, “I so much enjoyed reading the first three chapters of your book, I want to see the rest of it.” I was ecstatic! This might be the one.
As quickly as my computer would open my word file and I could get the printer turned on, I was printing out the entire work. I had it boxed up and in the mail the next morning and it seemed like every minute that ticked away on the clock was too much time to hear a reply from the agent. Over the next three weeks, I waited anxiously. Many times during each day I wondered how long it would be before I heard back from her. I could almost have mentally ticked the minutes off in my head. My excitement was waning the longer it took. My thought processes telling me she wouldn’t want to represent it because it had been too long since I had received her email. I kept telling myself to be patient, three weeks was nothing. She was just taking her time.
Apparently she must have heard me thinking as the very next day I received a large envelope from her agency. As excited as I had been that she had wanted to read the whole manuscript, I was just as frightened of opening that envelope. I just knew it was going to be another rejection letter even though the size of the envelope should have told me differently.
I laid that envelope on the computer desk and got online. Maybe I could find one of my friends on there to talk to. I needed some moral support and as usual I was alone in the house. It was ironic really, but out of all my friends I could have found online, it was my best friend that was there. He had been so supportive of me while I was seeking an agent and had encouraged me when even my husband had not. Already I felt better about having to open that envelope because I knew that no matter what it contained; Kevin would get me through it.
Now I realize that finding my friend was more encouraging to me than my husband had been might seem strange to some people. My now ex-husband had, however, only read perhaps the first hundred pages of my manuscript, determined it wasn’t the kind of book he wanted to read, and never read another word of it. After his comment I had turned to my friends for support. They had all been wonderful at giving me encouragement.
It had only taken a few minutes of talking to Kevin for me to pick up that envelope and open it. Inside, to my amazement, I found a letter and two copies of a contract. Big tears started rolling down my face as I read what the letter said. I can still remember those words and that letter has long since been tossed away. “After reading your entire manuscript, I have decided to represent your work.” The letter also stated she would need a one-time, non-refundable $250.00 fee up front in order to cover some of her costs. I was too excited to speak. I had no idea that any agent should never charge a fee. I had no idea at all about her role in the literary industry. It was really of no importance to me that she wanted that small amount of money except for one fact. I didn’t have it.
The one thing I did know was that I needed an agent. I also knew that I would have to borrow the money in order to pay her fee, but I was willing to do that if I got the representation. I was still thrilled that someone wanted to represent my work. After two years of taking courses, creating characters, and writing a novel, I was absolutely thrilled.
After about ten minutes of my sitting there with tears rolling down my cheeks, I remembered Kevin was still waiting to see what I had received. When I got my eyes clear enough I could focus, I noticed that he had most probably been typing the whole time I had been sitting there crying happy tears. He seemed to be growing impatient and his last post had said he was about to call me if I didn’t answer. He’s a real worrywart.
As I told Kevin what my letter said, he seemed almost as excited for me as I was thrilled. He and I talked for a while and I eventually calmed down to a point that I could leave his good company to go and cook dinner.
Weeks turned into months and months into almost a year. My agent had not had any luck selling my book to a publisher. She and I talked about once a month and every three months she would send me an envelope full of rejection letters from the publishers she said she had presented my manuscript to. I was becoming more than a little frustrated but I vowed to hang in there for the duration. Surely one publisher would find my work was what they wanted.
Just as the time was nearing for my agent to either renew my contract with her or back out, she called me. “I’ve sold your book.” I don’t remember anything else she said during that phone conversation except; “I’m sending you the contract to look over.” My God I was so happy. I think people living half a mile away could hear me. I called everybody I knew and told them. Even my now ex-husband seemed happy about it. Either that or he was finally glad that I would shut up mentioning that my agent still hadn’t sold my book.
When the contract arrived at my house, I sat down and went over it several times. I had a general attorney look it over as well. Not one that knew anything about contracts I later found out, but still an attorney. I again told everyone I knew, got all excited and was so happy that PublishAmerica was going to be publishing my book within the next year. I wasn’t sure I could wait a whole year to see it in print, but I didn’t have a choice. I stayed on cloud nine pretty much the whole time before my book was ready for print. I had contact with PublishAmerica’s support team, talked with people about my book cover; they put it through the editing process, which oddly enough to me hadn’t taken long. They sent me a copy of it, now in book format, and asked me to read back over it, see if there was anything in it that I wanted to change. I had two weeks to ask for any changes and then it would be printed.
I went over that text word for word, matching it against my manuscript pages. I changed very few things and only then because it seemed that when it had been put into book formatting, some errors had occurred. I listed out the page numbers I found errors on, the exact line and what word needed to be changed and sent them a reply in less than the two weeks I’d been given to make changes. It was now in its final print stages and I would soon have my two copies of my book that PublishAmerica would give me for free.
About a week later, I received a large envelope from PublishAmerica. I wasn’t sure what it contained but it was fairly thick. When I opened it, I found a certificate congratulating me on becoming a published author and taped to the bottom of it was my one dollar advance. The rest of the information in the envelope contained ways that I could use to market my book after its publication.
I was shocked. I called my agent right away and asked her what this packet was for; asked her why I had to market the book; asked her if all publishers made their authors do their own marketing. I asked many more questions that day and her answers to me left me very disheartened. It wasn’t until I had a signed contract; had gone through all of the things I’d had to do to get the book ready to be printed; was waiting to receive my copies of my own book, that I find out PublishAmerica is a print on demand publisher.
I was then informed by my agent that PublishAmerica would do little of the marketing for my book. I would have to set up book signings, radio and/or TV interviews, and present my book to newspapers for review. I thought to myself that this didn’t sound right, didn’t sound like something any of the authors of books I had purchased having had to do. It just didn’t sound feasible that having put as much effort into getting that book published as I had that I should also have to go out and sell it.
I think getting that envelope full of marketing ideas and the conversation with my agent that day was the beginning of the end. I pulled my contract out and read it again. It said nothing at all about me being the one to do the marketing. In fact, it said that my book would be available to book stores after it was in print. Apparently PublishAmerica had intentionally left out the part about my being its promoter. Not only would I have to market it, but I would also need copies of it to show to my prospects. I would need copies of it for book signings. I would need copies of it for anything I wanted to do with it.
“Okay” I said. “I will give this a try – see how it goes. I spent money I didn’t have to spend on books and bought fifty copies of my own book. I know I talked to every book store manager in my area. None of them would let me set up book signings in their store. When I asked why, I was told that they didn’t stock Print on Demand titles. I called radio stations in my area too, and asked about interviews. I got told no by all but one who was willing to do a two minute interview over the phone. I emailed my local newspapers and the replies I got from them stated that unless the book was on book store shelves, they weren’t interested. I managed to do the two minute phone interview which didn’t give me the time to do any bragging about the book, but only for the DJ’s to ask me some quick questions. (When will it be out? What is its title? What type of book is it?) It was really too short an interview to get any other information about the book out there.
At this point, having been turned down by so many places, I was beginning to hear this little voice telling me how dumb I was to ever let my agent sell my book to PublishAmerica. I went online and tried to find out more information about them. There was only their website and all I saw there was how many books they had published before mine. I contacted one other book store who told me that I had to get their wholesale company to buy my books before they would stock them. Okay, I can do that. I sent the nicest letter you’ve ever read to that buyer. They replied back to me that they would need PublishAmerica to fill out their buyers form and then they would be glad to purchase my books from them.
I drove all the way down to their location, even though it was about fifty miles one way and picked up that buyers form. I mailed it right away to PublishAmerica with a letter asking them to fill it out so that my book could be purchased by the buyer. It took them almost two weeks to reply back to me and the letter they sent me really made me angry. “We’re sorry but we do not do business with that buyer. We will not be sending them the filled in form.” At this point I was furious. I had spent hours, days, and weeks of my time trying to get my book on book shelves. During this same time, I had moved back to my home state with my son, and filed for divorce. I was out of work, out of money and very much out of patience.
I was also on a downhill spiral. I stopped trying to promote my book, bought no more copies of it and tried not to think about the mistake I had made in signing their contract. I hadn’t heard from my agent in months and she had never renewed our contract so I gave her no more thought either. I did however; remember all too quickly when I received my twice annual royalty statements showing no sales at all, even though I was sure there had been copies sold. I quit writing altogether. Somehow my work being sent to PublishAmerica had to mean that it hadn’t been good enough for anyone else to publish. I knew thinking that was wrong, but it was my way of not dealing with it. I wanted nothing more to do with writing and I had been writing something since I was young; even if it was just silly scribbles that meant nothing at all to anyone else. My dreams had been squashed, my skyscraper had been pulled out from under me and I wanted nothing more to do with writing at all. I took all my reference books and packed them away. Some I threw away. I just couldn’t let my disappointment consume me, so I tried not to think about it.
Two years went by; years when I should have been writing, perfecting my craft; years of receiving those “no sales” royalty statements; years that I cannot get back even if I wanted to; years wasted because I had been taken for a ride on the happy train only to find a mountain wall at the end of my journey. I couldn’t think about it. I really had little time to think about it now that I look back. My son was continuing to grow, advancing through school, getting ready to start college. I had to work, more than I have ever worked in my life to put him through college. I took on two jobs to pay his tuition. I worked when I had little energy left. He was my bright light, my reason why I didn’t stay in a pit of doubt. I wasn’t writing, but I was providing him with a college education, one that I never got. He was going to have life a bit easier because of it. I had to keep going. I was so proud of him when he graduated, at age twenty, with a degree in computer engineering.
After my son graduated and moved away from home, I could go back to working one job and try to find my own way again. I was divorced, and I now had time to think about things as a whole. I picked up a pencil one night and sat over a notebook for hours, trying to get words to come out the lead of the pencil. It seemed fruitless. I did that for several nights with no results. Finally, one night I got online and went to a game room. It wasn’t something I had done before and it looked interesting enough. While there, thoughts started swarming through my mind as to why people didn’t need to be so free with the information they posted in that game room on the chat window. The next morning I found myself with that same pad of paper and that same pencil. This time the words started to flow. I had more ideas as I went, developed characters and started creating a new novel.
Oh, but wait… PublishAmerica’s contract had stated that they wanted first look at my next manuscript. Somehow I had to dissuade them from wanting it. I printed out one copy of my newest novel, and revised it to where it was so poorly constructed that nobody in their right mind would want to publish it. I edited one copy of it on disc, printed that version out and mailed it to PublishAmerica. To my utter surprise, PublishAmerica sent me a rejection letter, stating that at the time they didn’t want to publish the second novel and I was free to sell it elsewhere.
I was elated that PublishAmerica didn’t want to print my second novel. I wasn’t so happy with that last statement, but given their reputation, figured it was fairly safe at being unwanted indefinitely. That second novel sat on my bookshelf for a long time, all the while, my friends asking me when it would be published. I was really embarrassed to tell them the reasons why I didn’t plan to send it to PublishAmerica.
I find that over the past five years, writing has become easier and is still something I want to pursue further. It took me time to get to a point where I could sit down for any extended period of time and just write. Somewhere in the back of my mind for the longest time was this little voice asking me; “How do you know if your writing is good enough to be published?” Instead of giving up, I pulled that second book off the shelf, revised it one more time, and started looking for an agent again. I ended up going the wrong way again with finding a good agent, but was lucky enough to figure that out before anything had been done to try and sell my novel. I figured the worst that would have happened was that my second book would also have ended up with PublishAmerica. I also knew that since I had been down that road before, that should I ever receive their contract in the mail again. I would never sign it.
I can’t say now that I am working on perfecting my writing, just improving on it daily. I don’t think there ever will be a perfect work written by anyone. I intend to find a good agent this time around. If that never happens then I will know that perhaps my work wasn’t what they were looking for instead of an agent accepting what I write for a fee, and then pretend to be submitting it to genuine publishers.
I discovered after four years in publication through PublishAmerica that all I really had to do in order to get my contract with them cancelled was to put it in writing and ask. I also started doing extensive research on agents and publishers and when I have my book as ready as I think it can be to send the inevitable query letter to, I will be armed with the information to help me find a good one.
I recently found a wonderful writer’s group of which I joined. There are many good people on the site that offer help with writing. What I want for my writing hasn’t really changed. I’d still like to be legitimately published one day. I’m not sure my dreams are quite as big as they used to be, but there is still a need there that, for me, has to be quenched.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend PublishAmerica to anyone – not if you ever want to really get published and see your books on book store shelves. If your only reason to get your work in print is to have a copy to show to your family and friends then any Print on Demand publisher, subsidy publisher or vanity publisher would work just fine. Mine is only one story of a writer who went down the wrong road in order to get a novel in print. There are many more that have similar stories as mine. Over all, if you want to have your work in publication by a company that will work for you and with you, instead of only printing out copies of your work that you buy and that you have to sell – find a good agent who will sell your writing to a good publisher.
My former PublishAmerica book is now in revision. Whether or not the novel ever gets published in the world outside of Print on Demand publishing remains to be seen. It will be of great satisfaction to me having rewritten it. The only thing I will add for anyone out there who is a first time author is this: Know who you are submitting your work to. Research every agent before you submit anything to them. Find out what titles they have represented or published. Go to your local book stores and look through the genre you write to see what publisher’s published the works. Beware any agent who asks for a fee up front. Unless it is a contest you are entering where sometimes there are entry fees, agents get paid when they sell your work. Find an agent who will work with you, not against you, to have your work edited, critiqued and then who will work hard to sell your work for you. All manuscripts need editing no matter how well a person thinks he/she has written it. Sometimes someone else’s eyes reading the work will see things we as writers couldn’t see. They will find any redundancies, the overuse of adjectives and adverbs. They will check it for grammar usage, spelling and punctuation, and also the flow of the work, not to mention other things. PublishAmerica doesn’t do all of that and in fact now has an option for the author to decline editing. As writers, why would we not want our manuscripts edited? I look forward to the whole publishing process - including the editing.
Used with permission.
copyright Teresa Black 2007
This work may not be used without the expressed permission of Teresa Black.
" I love to be inspired by good writing."
I started writing as a hobby. Before I knew it I had a book written and then published. "TICK" is a Thriller, of 240 pages in length and was published in 2002. I requested the contract through Publish America be cancelled. This book is no longer available. Suspense novel published in May, 2002, "TICK" Nominated for recognition into the "Who's Who in U.S. Writers, Editors, and Poets" by American Biographical Institute, Inc., May, 2001 Member of Absolute Write and Writers Net My book was published through Publish America in 2002 and I would NOT recommend them to anyone. I have a second novel finished and am searching for a good agent or publishing house.
Background Information
Birth Place
Pell City, AL USA
Accomplishments
Additional Information
Always a delight to see PA being whammied. Not because I was scammed by them as a writer, but because I used to work there. Right in the acquisitions department, no less, until I realized that I should leave for a much more enriching and pleasant career with more intelligent supervisors, such as being a sheep-dung taster.
In all seriousness, it is simply the most miserable workplace you can possibly imagine, outside of some third-world countries. I finally quit after I was told my quotas for accepting manuscripts weren't high enough and that my supervisors worried I was stressing quality over quantity. In publishing! What a notion! (Except they were careful to say they didn't have quotas. They just had "certain numbers you should be meeting daily." Which of course is DIFFERENT from a quota, because of the spelling.)
I pity the employees left behind. Most of them are young, non-college grads who have to eat, too. I wouldn't have been there myself, except we were new to the area and hard up for any income. (They won't interview anybody who looks too sharp on paper. My modest BFA in Theatre Tech must not have been threatening to them. Clearly my partner's degree in English with honors was; she didn't get an interview.) All of the employees have to keep track of daily numbers for how many books they accept or reject. If your numbers fall, you get chewed out. Trust me. At least one person was subject to a daily gnawing in Miranda Prather's office, which was right by my desk. Lovely to listen to while you're copy and pasting rote responses from form letters, the only things you're allowed to tell authors! (To this day when my boss closes a door, I cringe instinctively.)
You couldn't decline books without getting the permission of a supervisor-- supervisors who in my case had less education than me and regularly sent emails with grammatical errors of unfathomable stupidity. Someday I will make a book of them and publish them! ...somewhere else.
When they say they reject 80%, that includes everything they get and don't publish, like single poems and authors who are underage, previously published books, and works that are too short. It's like saying you're cutting back on portions because you didn't eat the plate and silverware.
You can also get your name linked to PA online, which I was flat out not going to do. In fact, it was worrying about having my name tied to PA that really made me leave. I'm a fantasy writer, and the last thing I wanted was for a potential publisher's google to turn me up as a loyal drone of PA. Not when my private blog was blue every day with my loathing of the place: the slimy work practices and the underhanded dealings. Add that to the days when the (single) toilet didn't work, and not getting Christmas off (Promised paid yearly holidays? pfft! What's that? There are authors to gull!), and the fact that frequently there was no heat, and you begin to see what it was like there. Not to mention the petty backbiting and sniping and bitching between departments, and the pure sleazy feeling at the end of the day. True, most of the books put through by PA are really unpublishable drek about "How I contacted the Spirit of [insert dead or living celebrity here] and became his One True Love on the Other Side" or "My uncle's father's cousin's battle with elbow cancer and my poems about Jesus". But the manuscripts that really were good and really had promise always made me sad. Secretly I would rejoice whenever one of those authors slipped away, or realized that the contract was a load of horseshit. Most of them caught on.
After a few months that felt like years, my partner and I finally decided that yes, really, we WOULD rather starve. Which luckily we did not, though now I have a wealth of "negative workplace examples" for any future job interviews. ^_~ When that place finally does go down, my dance card is open for a gravetop foxtrot.
Thank you, Teresa, for the invitation(75). I'm afraid my response is quite long. I'm a longtime reader of the blog here, and ever since working at PA I occasionally check out the AW forum on the subject-- but this is the first time I've ever mentioned anything publicly. In fact, I find it hard to believe that no other former employees have spoken up. Perhaps they simply don't follow the threads, or just want to forget their experiences? Either that, or very few of them are actually writers so it doesn't relate to them once they don't work there anymore. PA seems to go out of the way not to hire anyone with experience in the field, which is why my resume must have confused them with what they considered a non-relevant degree. Clearly, people who do theatre have no experience with literature or the written word. Ahem.
As far as I recall, I signed no contracts not to speak about the work practices there, and it has been some years now since I was there (my data may therefore be out of date), and they certainly can't fire me now! However, I admit that talking about the experience on a public forum is uncomfortable. I'm well aware that the upper echelon of PA frequently haunts the websites of its detractors, at least in my time, and I see no reason why they would have stopped. I mentioned to my partner, only half joking, that maybe PA would hire someone to shut me up. She retorted, "No, that would cost them money."
Which really sums up PA in a nutshell right there.
All the same, I will try not to directly discuss the people I worked with, and simply tell you about my experiences and the acquisitions process as it stood at the time. I'm sure you can infer the psychological standards of that office, as I frequently in my journal referred to the place as Lord of the Flies Publishing. If anyone has any other questions, I'll try to answer them to the best of my ability and without descending into too much angry froth.
Being new to the area, I was excited and thrilled that there was a local publisher hiring for their acquisitions department. I thought having some serious experience with publishing could give me a real step up in looking for a publisher for my own work. It has, actually, but by showing me everything I should not look for in a publisher. Naturally, with very little professional experience, I figured I would start at the bottom of the department, making photocopies and coffee or something. I should have been suspicious when they immediately had me screening queries.
Now, before accepting the job, I did go to their website and look around. They do a fine job both on the site and in person presenting themselves as a small sort of genre publisher, and I was honestly desperate for a 8-5 desk job with benefits of any sort, especially in something of such interest to me. My sister and her husband both publish under smaller, academic imprints and it seemed very much the same sort of thing. The office at the time was in a tiny appealing downtown brownstone (after we moved to their current cavernous building, the job became much worse), obviously converted from a house. I was delighted. I was thrilled. I was working in publishing, and maybe once I had my current project to my satisfaction, I would have a good shot at getting published myself.
This elation lasted maybe a week, but in retrospect it felt like about nine seconds. My major clue that something was iffy was one morning in the bathroom. There were boxes of manuscripts stacked in there, and one day out of curiosity I peeked in to see what they were. What I found were simply the most horrific manuscripts you can imagine. Terrible fantasy stories that were really Mary-Sue fanfics with replaced names. Religious tracts that were obviously written by flaming zealots. And plenty of people who were just plain crazy. I thought I had found the rejected manuscripts-- no wonder they were stuffed in the bathroom! Imagine my horror when I found out shortly that those were the accepted ones. I stopped mentioning that I had a manuscript in progress, and changed the subject when it was brought up.
The acquisitions process was fairly simple. We got hundreds of queries, and we had to do a certain number of them a day, depending on whether or not we were also accepting manuscripts. By the time I left they liked for us to have something like forty queries done in the morning, and about twenty manuscripts screened in the afternoon. Yes. Twenty. At least. Also for a time, I personally was Publish Britannica. I don't know who or what was really in the office in the UK, if anyone, but all the website queries and manuscripts came through us, in the States.
Manuscripts could only be rejected for a certain set of reasons, all of which were tied into how costly or time-consuming it would be to get the thing to press. No books with too many illustrations, such as comic books or children's picture books. Nothing from deceased authors, nothing previously published, nothing from authors under the age of sixteen-- too many legal things to wrangle for a book PA knew wouldn't sell. "Previously published" to them also meant if you had printed out a couple copies of your book and given it to friends for editing. Nothing pornographic-- at least overtly so, and there was no way of knowing until the thing was read. Which I expect was first done by the author when he received his PA published book. Nothing from certain countries where it would be too troublesome to deal with the authors. Nothing too short or too long-- though if it was too long it was suggested it could be TWO books. And too short was anything under the whopping number of 8,500 words. I've had research papers longer than that, and I'm sure most of you have. Anything with an obvious copyright infringement was rejected, and by obvious I mean if there were copies of Harry Potter actually photocopied, and cited, and encircled with highlighter, stapled in the manuscript. I know I tried to stop things for copyright rips that didn't get approved for rejection by my supervisors, mostly because they hadn't played the videogames the manuscripts were obviously based on, and I had. Second books had to be approved, meaning the first book had to sell at least a couple of copies.
But if it passed those criteria, there was nothing to stop both the query acceptance and the book from getting published. If anything was rejected, it had to be for one of the above reasons and you had to put that in your tally sheet. Any other steaming cowpats that came through and weren't too much trouble to print, 'fit PA like a glove.' Of course.
Manuscript acceptance? Make sure the title hasn't been used before by PA and the email is not that of a blacklisted author. Make sure it can't be rejected for the exacting list of reasons above. Read the first few pages. Read the last few pages. Read a few pages around in the middle, and then find some unique-looking text and perform a search in the manuscript to make sure that there aren't just repeated sections of text. If that's all clear, CONGRATULATIONS. You've been offered a contract. And if you're me, feel yet another tiny bit of your soul shrivel up and die. Now you see how we got through so many a day. At least, everyone else did. I put in extra effort to actually read the damn things, and try to actually answer author questions in emails. But saying to my supervisors, "My cat could write a better novel than this merely by digesting typewriter parts" was not enough to get a book turned down. My artistic sensibilities were summarily ignored, and the book accepted.
Emails should have been quick business. There was a searchable list of all the questions an author would ask, and a trite, cut and paste answer to give. Saying anything else was generally frowned upon, which prevented me from lacing my emails with hidden messages, such as randomly capitalizing letters to spell "OMG RUN AWAY." Lots of bullshit had my name signed to it that way. For example, we often said how the author would have to send off to the Library of Congress personally for registration of copyright, and cover the fees as well.
Everything was done that way, with set responses, from queries to contract negotiations. Want more royalties? Sure, just ask, and they will offer you a slight raise. Doesn't matter, because your book won't sell anyway. Book in bookstores? Well, between us, form letter to potential sucker, bookstores don't ACTUALLY stock books anymore. Not very many of them. Because there are so many books being published, MOST books don't get in bookstores. Really! It's true! You can hardly buy a book in a bookstore these days, but you can get gift soaps and a latte. So sign with PA! A big name publisher couldn't get you in a bookstore anyway. And people bought it-- hook, line, and sinker.
In speaking to other employees, I found out a lot about how the rest of the process worked. To have a manuscript accepted, the author had to provide an electronic copy for PA. PA would not type it from a printed manuscript. Editors? Had to finish editing something like three books in a week. There was no time for a real read-through, though many of them attempted it, and many of them left for other jobs in the space of a month. At best, a spell-check and skimming was all they could do. Devoting too much time to a single work made your numbers drop, and if your numbers fell for too long, well. Sucker born every minute, which means there are lots of them reading the classifieds.
Also during my time there, near the end, I got to help with mailing out of royalty checks. As a writer, it was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life. Most of the checks were only zeros. If they had any amount at all, it was rarely more than fifteen or twenty dollars. Big sellers might have a check for fifty or sixty bucks, and those were really few and far between. How many people waited for those checks, only to get a useless document for seventy-nine cents, or six dollars, or nothing at all.
The big thing I noticed about PA is they were very careful not to do anything that was strictly illegal. Unethical, yes, but you don't go to jail for ethics much these days. That's why they're still out there snaking around. I always said that PA would still do a great business if only they were honest about what they were doing. Because many of those books of course would not be published anywhere else, and many of the authors can't afford self-publish fees, some people could do well with PA. If you're a church group wanting to print a book for evangelical use, or a grandmother wanting to do up copies of your memoirs for your family, PA wouldn't be a bad option. If you're a pompous jerk with a terrible book and think you're better than Steven King (we got lots of those), well you kind of deserve what you get there. PA will publish you if nobody else will. I guess not even PA wants to be known as "Last Ditch Publishing," but surely there is a place for that. There were enough manuscripts there to sustain a good business, and by only printing books that actually are bought, PA never really loses much money on its books. Marketed correctly and honestly, and without the hellish contract, it could put pay-up-front vanity presses in a tight spot.
But if you're a good writer, and think PA is a place where you can get in without fiddling with an agent, and that a contract is a new life for you and your book will be in stores and you can stop writing on scraps of napkins behind the counter of the 7-11, and all those other tight-knit author dreams close up your throat whenever you think about your story, and you have ink in your veins, then PA is the worst sort of misfortune that can happen to you. Unfortunately, it's not illegal yet to rip off someone's dreams.
And that's what made me leave. I was someone else entirely by the end of it, consumed by an awful job, miserable on every level, and certainly I was not writing. I was also being paid only six bucks an hour, with crummy benefits and no paid time off. Even the yearly holidays we were expected to be given were denied us. Christmas that year fell on a weekend, so instead of having the adjacent day be the holiday, we had the day off revoked entirely. I hated every condescending instant I was there, being bossed around by someone who didn't know where to stick her apostrophes; and while I wasn't there, I hated that I had to go back. Finally, after six months and right before some performance reviews, what would have been an unpleasant but short bout of food poisoning turned into a four-day ordeal. I was easily the sickest I have ever been in my entire life. I broke down completely. When I came back to work I had lost fifteen pounds, missed three days of work, and looked like death regurgitated. In that time I'd had nothing to eat except saltines and Gatorade, and that only in the last day.
I was promptly taken into the meeting to discuss my low work numbers, and only at the end did someone say, "Hey, you don't look so good." I think they expected me to be concerned or upset by their reprimand. Inside, I was laughing hysterically. When I gave my two week notice shortly after, I wrote a very careful letter, thanking PA for the position and the time I had spent there. I was as professional as I could manage, and my email was not even answered by my supervisor. I had been written off entirely, and for the rest of my time there I was given a cold shoulder that would not have been out of place in a middle-school girls' bathroom. One of the girls who left shortly after me told me that they hadn't even accepted her two week notice and offer to train her replacement. Instead they had her leave immediately-- they didn't want to pay two salaries at once.
I was jealous. Had I known it worked that way, I would have offered to train a replacement, too. ^_^