Slashdot Mirror
SF Writers Sting Supposedly Traditional Publisher
deeptrace writes "A group of SF writers all submitted purposely awful stories to a publisher that purported to publish only selected high quality works. They created the worst story they could come up with, and it was accepted for publication." Their press release is pretty funny -- and if you'd like a sample of their insane prose, it's available through the book's Lulu site. (Where, Yes, you could also buy the whole thing.)
Well, that'll be written in history.
with the people on one usenet group submitting intentionally
bad manuscripts to some company and get most of them
published?
Oh yeah, not first post!
"A note of caution: reading this thing may cause temporary brain damage."
"We will therefore just monitor his sign's"
Le français vous intéresse?
Then no claims of finding it in "editorial review."
- AMW
Dear Writer, Your posting of the Press Release Text is rejected as it does not seem to have paragraphs of any kind. Regards, Slashdot readers.
elSpike out.
But I wish they'd publish the whole thing (all that was accepted, that is).
"just monitor his sign's". Ha ha. Soooo sexy.
copy-paste any chapter of Battlefield Earth
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
How do you think stories get published on Slashdot?
Life in Orange County
Maybe the editor who accepted the book for publication could fill michael's position at slashdot - sounds like he'd fit right in !
Given the recent tales of editorial misconduct do /. editors have anything to declare?
This isn't surprising. Seriously, the only books you ever hear about are the good ones. But there are thousands of writers and thousands of books published, and someone has to read them, right? It's kinda like how there's a few good TV shows and everyone raves about them, but tons of "reality TV" where you can't help but wonder why they even exist. Yet, someone, somewhere must watch them. It's the same with books.
I understand that SF can be meant to stand for "Science Fiction," though I don't think I've ever heard anybody say "I like to read a lot of SF." However, when we have virtually unlimited screen real estate, is it really necessary to shorten 'SciFi' to 'SF'? It's just a difference of three letters. Living in the Bay Area, I immediately thought this was an electic group of liberal-minded San Francisco writers publishing something scandalous under a "traditional" publisher. Guess the joke's on me.
c'mon it was "freeform" we're talking about.
Sounds about right.
Forget trying to read the very short sample... it hurts. The quotes at the end, however, are a hoot. All of them are things someone could easily say about a true masterpiece of any literary era. Verne, Asimov, Clarke, Hemingway, Chaucer, Homer... and coming to a bookstore near you, a genius named Travis Tea who will soon be storming the NYTimes bestseller list!
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
This book is better than any book ever written. It is better than any book that will ever be written in the future. And I haven't even read it yet.
An AC gets modded down.
Sees no purpose in life.
Wants to kill himself.
Is a loser.
Whom no one loves.
And wants to have sex with.
Even after reading ESR's sexy-looking HOWTO.
Live sucks.
Badly.
An earlier effort by 25 Newsday staffers produced the 1969 best seller Naked Came the Stranger.
Like here at slashdot there isn't a variety of styles mingling. One theory has won the darwinian battle and thus realising it they have gamed that system.
Entropy is a law after all.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
including one professional writer, use the term SF because they use it to refer to "Speculative Fiction".
This is due to a realization that a lot of "science fiction" doesn't really contain all that much science.
Interpret this how you like.
I worked with a guy once who fancied himself a writer of love poetry. I thought it was pretty awful, saccharine stuff myself, but he had a couple of fans on some amateur poety website. Who was I to criticize?
I always felt bad, though, because he put together a book and found some vanity publisher to publish it for him. He apparently didn't know how the publishing business worked, though, because he was convinced that he was being published for real, and that the book would be his ticket to fame and fortune. I remember him being very excited when they "accepted" his book, and would publish it as soon as he came up with $4000. He then started hitting up everyone he knew to "invest" in his book, which he was sure would be a bestseller. I never had the heart to explain to him that real publishers pay you when they put out your book.
This is an example of the brilliant hoax first devised by "Naked Came The Stranger" (first link in Google), where a group of reporters wrote a book deliberately designed to be bad to show the crap and lack of taste that was coming out of the trashy romantic novel genre. At least 2 explicit sexual acts per chapter, the more deviant the better. Good writing and grammer were to be thoroughly sponged out of the book. They hired the sister of one of the writers I think to play the author and go around on TV shows saying rediculous stuff supposedly to promote the book.
The funny thing was that the book was published and then became so popular and the money grew so much that they spilled their guts and told the world about the hoax.
The abbreviation "SF" for speculative fiction arguably includes fantasy as well.
Pain. .
Whispering voices.
Pain.
Pain. Pain. Pain.
Need pee--new pain--what are they sticking in me? . .
Sleep.
Pain.
Whispering voices.
"As you know, Nurse Eastman, the government spooks controlling this hospital will not permit me to give this patient the care I think he needs."
"Yes, doctor." The voice was breathy, sweet, so sweet and sexy.
"We will therefore just monitor his sign's. Serious trauma like this patient suffered requires extra care, but the rich patsies controlling the hospital will make certain I cannot try any of my new treatments on him."
"Yes, doctor." That voice was soooo sexy! Bruce didn't care about treatments. He cared about pain, and he cared about that voice, because when he heard the voice, the pain went away, just for a few seconds, like.
I'm not a nerd. Nerds are smart.
Did anyone else immediately think of SourceForge when they say the acronym SF used? I know they don't have writers, but seeing how this is slashdot, SourceForge came to mind before Science Fiction did. ...weird.
Pain. .
Whispering voices.
Pain.
Pain. Pain. Pain.
Need pee--new pain--what are they sticking in me? . .
Sleep.
Pain.
Whispering voices.
"As you know, Nurse Eastman, the government spooks controlling this hospital will not permit me to give this patient the care I think he needs."
"Yes, doctor." The voice was breathy, sweet, so sweet and sexy.
"We will therefore just monitor his sign's. Serious trauma like this patient suffered requires extra care, but the rich patsies controlling the hospital will make certain I cannot try any of my new treatments on him."
"Yes, doctor." That voice was soooo sexy!
Bruce didn't care about treatments. He cared about pain, and he cared about that voice, because when he heard the voice, the pain went away, just for a few seconds, like.
"Atlanta Nights" goes on to become the best selling novel of the year.
You know how dumb the average american is, just remember, statistically, half of them are even dumber.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Where's the alanta_nights.torret?
Just when you thought you'd heard the last of MTV's Punk'd, it's... Punk'd 2000: Sci-Fi Edition
www.kiwilyrics.com - a wiki for lyrics
You're absolutely right.
/.-ing, they may now mold --or 'freeform', as were your words-- it into anything..
With their server melting due to
The Washington Post also has a very interesting article on the likes of PublishAmerica at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25187-20 05Jan20?language=printer
You'd think someone would have realized something was wrong with the pen name Travis Tea...
is here
If you're gonna Karma Whore, at least do it right.
h ingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A251 87-2005Jan20.html
Science Fiction Authors Hoax Vanity Publisher
"Atlanta Nights," by Travis Tea, was offered a publishing contract by PublishAmerica of Frederick, Maryland.
Washington, DC (PRWEB) January 28, 2005 -- Over a holiday weekend last year, some thirty-odd science fiction writers banged out a chapter or two apiece of "Atlanta Nights," a novel about hot times in Atlanta high society. Their objective: to write a deeply awful novel to submit to PublishAmerica, a self-described "traditional publisher" located in Frederick, Maryland.
The project began after PublishAmerica posted an attack on science fiction authors at one of its websites (http://www.authorsmarket.net/). PublishAmerica claimed "As a rule of thumb, the quality bar for sci-fi and fantasy is a lot lower than for all other fiction.... [Science fiction authors] have no clue about what it is to write real-life stories, and how to find them a home." It described them as "writers who erroneously believe that SciFi, because it is set in a distant future, does not require believable storylines, or that Fantasy, because it is set in conditions that have never existed, does not need believable every-day characters."
The writers wanted to see where PublishAmerica puts its own quality bar; if the publisher really is selective, as the company claims, or if it is a vanity press that will accept almost anything, as publishing professionals assert.
"Atlanta Nights" was completed, any sign of literary competence was blue-penciled, and the resulting manuscript was submitted.
PublishAmerica accepted it.
From: PublishAmerica Aquisitions [e-mail protected from spam bots]
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Subject: Atlanta Nights
As this is an important piece of email regarding your book, please read it completely from start to finish. I am happy to inform you that PublishAmerica has decided to give "Atlanta Nights" the chance it deserves....Welcome to PublishAmerica, and congratulations on what promises to be an exciting time ahead.
Sincerely,
Meg Phillips
Acquisitions Editor
PublishAmerica
The hoax was publicly revealed on January 23, 2005. PublishAmerica withdrew their offer shortly afterward:
From: "PublishAmerica Acquisitions"
Sent: Monday, January 24, 2005
Subject: Your Submission to PublishAmerica
We must withdraw our offer to publish "Atlanta Nights". Upon further review it appears that your work is not ready to be published. There are portions of nonsensical text in the manuscript that were caught by our editing staff as they previewed the text for editing time assessment pending your acceptance of our offer.
On the positive side, maybe you want to consider contracting the book with a vanity publisher such as iUniverse or Author House. They will certainly publish your book at a fee.
Thank you.
PublishAmerica Acquisitions Department
Those who wish to see the novel, "Atlanta Nights" by Travis Tea, for themselves can find it at
http://www.lulu.com/travis-tea
Publication at Lulu.com is free.
For more information about PublishAmerica and vanity presses, see:
http://www.sfwa.org/beware/
http://www.was
# # #
lately??!!! where have you been?
.. and was posting some drivel on Slashdot when the aliens landed and sucked my brain out. Da End.
The same thing that's been wrong for years: people who don't understand that something that happened a few days ago - even a few weeks ago - is still news.
Great, you heard about it days ago, doubtless you monitor all sorts of websites and cable news channels 24/7 and know everything before the rest of us. Congratulations, you win. But those of us who occasionally turn away from the various glass teats appreciate hearing about things that may have happened more than five minutes ago.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
What the heck did I post? Must be getting tired. I meant, "Did anyone else immediately think of SourceForge when they saw the acronym SF used?"
Here's the free blurb from the publisher:
.
--------------
Atlanta Nights
by
Travis Tea
Chapter 1
Pain.
Whispering voices.
Pain.
Pain. Pain. Pain.
Need pee--new pain--what are they sticking in me? . .
Sleep.
Pain.
Whispering voices.
"As you know, Nurse Eastman, the government spooks controlling this hospital will not permit me to give this patient the care I think he needs."
"Yes, doctor." The voice was breathy, sweet, so sweet and sexy.
"We will therefore just monitor his sign's. Serious trauma like this patient suffered requires extra care, but the rich patsies controlling the hospital will make certain I cannot try any of my new treatments on him."
"Yes, doctor." That voice was soooo sexy!
Bruce didn't care about treatments. He cared about pain, and he cared about that voice, because when he heard the voice, the pain went away, just for a few seconds, like.
----------------------
Need pee. Sign's. Hahaha, unbelievable.
Evan
My CCG Design Blog
I never heard of SciFi before the net and before the infamous scifi tv channel was born. It was always referenced as "SF genre", in bibliothek under the "SF thema" and we wrote about SF book. Heck it was sometimes SPOKEN as S.F. but first time I heard of it as SciFi in the last 25 years was in the late 99 on the net. Now granted it could also be a country/culture difference on how you name it.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I hear WB bought the rights to the stories and have hired Travolta.
The manuscript for the entire book can be downloaded from here: http://critters.critique.org/sting/StingManuscript .pdf
Its 280 pages or so but you can shrink it down to about 30 if you're good at reading small text.
With the moo and the cow and the fish. Minesweeper Record: 7 sec
This is the freely available first page of the book. Mod up if (when) the site collapses.
.
Pain.
Whispering voices.
Pain.
Pain. Pain. Pain.
Need pee--new pain--what are they sticking in me? . .
Sleep.
Pain.
Whispering voices.
"As you know, Nurse Eastman, the government spooks controlling this hospital will not permit me to give this patient the care I think he needs."
"Yes, doctor." The voice was breathy, sweet, so sweet and sexy.
"We will therefore just monitor his sign's. Serious trauma like this patient suffered requires extra care, but the rich patsies controlling the hospital will make certain I cannot try any of my new treatments on him."
"Yes, doctor." That voice was soooo sexy!
Bruce didn't care about treatments. He cared about pain, and he cared about that voice, because when he heard the voice, the pain went away, just for a few seconds, like.
(commentary) It should be noted that this is only the first page of the book, and therefore even a quick glance should have discovered the unprintable nature of this work.
to The Eye of Argon
When will they make the movie?
I'm an English major and I would say that an writer's attempt at their worst story is still a form of creative expression. Just my .02
This could simply support my own theory that science fiction is like flan: there's no difference between the good stuff and the bad stuff.
Actually, I'll amend that: reading nearly any science fiction is like eating flan, but reading Neal Stephenson is like eating flan from between Jennifer Connelly's breasts while you're high.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
In this thread incoherent trolling is actually on-topic!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Associated Press has an article about it and points out: "Some writers organizations will not accept PublishAmerica authors or offer only limited memberships. Those organizations include the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Mystery Writers of America and the Authors Guild, whose members include Stephen King and Scott Turow. The organization gets about 50 membership requests a year from PublishAmerica authors. All are rejected, said executive director Paul Aiken." Here is the link to the article: http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/Stories/0,1413,2 09~23371~2682604,00.html
Sun and Fun
Sorry, Mr. Beckett, but you need a more coherent story.
An alternative weekly sent stories by famous writers (Beckett, Garcia Marquez, Angela Carter) out to 20 literary magazines under different names. 12 were rejected and 8 got no reply. Choice quotes from the rejection letters:
and
I cannot see the point with this. It is difficult to write good literature. Everyone agrees on that. If it had been easy to say what's good in literature, everyone would have written master pieces. Here are some people who put a lot of effort into a book. Someone else realises that a lot of effort has been put in there, and that it is highly original. That the intent of the effort was to "be bad" was not obvious, because the writers simply did not know what "bad" was in the eyes of the reviewer. Your book does not automatically become very bad because you claim that you intended it to be bad, as little as it becomes very good, if you intend it to be good. No one can with any confidence tell what makes a book good, and no one knows for certain what makes a book a bestseller. There is no joke here - it is simply an illustration to what has been known for a long time.
Pretty painful, and IIRC depressing.
Someday we'll all be negroes
Putting on my skepticism hat, I ask : Is this a cheap publicity stunt by a group of under talented people who hate PublishAmerica ?? They get to slander PublishAmerica and surprize, thanks to all the cheap publicity , people start wondering hoe their book is , and pay 11 $ for a piece of worthless carp . Its disgusting.
Opps, I'll continue this later, Now let me hurry and order the book before its sold out.
Now can anyone tell us who the SF authors are?
I have looked into getting it published someday and I have run into the elitist attitudes of some publishers. I like the point in the press release where the publishing house suggests that they go to a you-pay-for the book to be published type of house.
I'm pining for the fjords...
His old friend, Isadore, shook his massive head at him. "We know how it must be to have a lot of money but no working car," he said, the harsh Macon County drawl of his voice softened by his years in Atlanta high society. "It's my pleasure to bring you back to your fancy apartment, and we're all so happy that y'all is still alive. Y'all could have been killed in that dreadful wreck." Isadore paused to put on the turn signal before making a safe turn across rush-hour traffic into the parking lot of Bruce Lucent's luxury apartment building. "Y'all'll gets a new car on Monday."
"I don't know how I'll be able to drive it with my arm in a cast," Bruce Lucent shoots back. "It's lucky I wasn't killed outright like so many people are when they have horrid automobile wrecks."
"Fortunately, fast and efficient Emergency Medical Services, based on a program founded by Lyndon Baines Johnson the 36th President of the United States helped y'all survive an otherwise, deadly crash," Isadore chuckled. He nodded his head toward the towering apartment building, in the very shadow of Peachtree Avenue, where Bruce lived his luxurious life. So young, yet so wealthy, based on his skills as an expert software developer.
I am sure all of you insanely wealthy "expert programmers" can relate.
Basic idea: Sokal is a physics professor at NYU, and he got fed up with left-wing sociologists writing pseudo-scientific gibberish, so he wrote a hilarious nonsensical article entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, which was published in a trendy lit-crit journal. Needless to say, when the hoax was revealed it created quite a stir in philosophy and lit-crit circles.
I kinda liked reading the first page (all I read). I actually thought the style was better than that I read on three random pages of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
Finally, someone who's willing to stand up to all those whining babies who say "but this happened to days ago...waaaaaaaaaaaah!".
You have my thanks.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Doesn't this happen every time Terry Goodkind gets something published?
it's companies like this that somedays leave me ashamed to be a modern American
see, suits will sell out anything
ftp://ftp.sff.net/pub/people/doylemacdonald/Sting/
Since the PDF wasn't working, here ya go!
Except that that one was published
The Red Tape War was written by three authors (Jack L. Chalker, Mike Resnick, and George A. Effinger), each seemingly trying to outdo the others.
It made for an interesting read. In fact, I think I'll have to dig it out again...
H.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
Yes yes, karma-whoring again, go ahead and say it.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
...this is all an elaborate, carefully orchestrated publicity stunt for Lulu. They set up this umbrella publisher specifically so it could take this temporary fall, banking on a huge swarm of people buying the book. Just you watch, it'll be a runaway bestseller, thanks to this shrewd viral marketing scheme.
Sure, read this and laugh, but hasn't this whole thing made you interested in reading the whole book? Haven't you thought about buying a copy, maybe as a small way of sticking it to the man?
[puts on tinfoil hat]
Did I mention I have my own chapter in the book? (Of which everyone should buy 2 copies.)
~Anonymous Coward (I mean, um, Book Industry Insider! Yeah. I came up with the scheme, but they fired me. That's why I'm going public. Well...public terminal, anyway.)
-
Humuhumunukunukuapua'a
In the next paragraph they include three of the four things it was suppose to leave out, a Plot, and character development, and certainly purports to have some social insight. Even if it was minimal, it existed.
However, given the American fascination for sex and violence, it's no wonder the book sold well. None of the pr0n "novels" I've read have had much of a plot to them.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
I'm surprised noone has brought up The Woodside Literary Agency.
The Woodside Literary Agency spammed certain Usenet newsgroups looking for authors.
For a fee, they would represent an author to get his work published.
They apparently never met a manuscript they didn't like.
So some of the participants in one of the misc.writing newsgroup had a contest to see if anyone could get a manuscript rejected.
For example, see Even Hitler got the blues
For those too lazy to download the RTF of Atlanta Nights, one of the faux sci-fi stories. Here they are.
.
Pain.
Whispering voices.
Pain.
Pain. Pain. Pain.
Need pee--new pain--what are they sticking in me? . .
Sleep.
Pain.
And yes, after I laughed and laughed, in my side I felt pain.
I went to an engineering school tht required English writing for the students.
The first year I was put off by the guy who told me that I couldn't write, which I knew was BS.
SO the following year I took the sample that the English department had provided and used the exact same phrasing and structure for a large part of my paper.
When I was reviewed the English TA told me that I sucked as a writer. At this point I pulled out the 'sample' and showed how mine was exactly the same as theirs.
The TA could only say that the last years sample was not the current one. I told him that if the English department was that lax, then why trust them now. I explained that I had a BA from a different school and wrote 5 papers a week for 3 years.
He didn't know what to say.
Wow. It's a damn shame my mod points expired earlier today. Where's the +1 PutThatInYourPipeAndSmokeIt mod when you need one?
Well said.
... it's called "Nature Photography Naturally" by James Egbert and it illustrates this point perfectly. This dude literally went online and took whatever photos he could find, filled the book with a bunch of BS about which kind of film to use, and got published. I know the book is a scam because he used to brag about how he was making money off of "poor naive people who don't know that it took [him] only a week to throw this piece of crap together"
d =1212/
Oh, the offending "piece of crap" can be found here:
http://people.lulu.com/blogs/view_post.php?post_i
Those comments were likely written by the people I had an English writing "lab" with when I was still trying to decide what to major in. Most of my classmates were Junior or Senior class standing, but none of them could write to save their lives.
I dropped out of the class roughly 1/3rd of the way through it as I could no longer take the stupidity. Everyone in the class had to write a 5-10 page short story from (IIRC - this occured about 3 years ago) the first person perspective. I wrote this short story - or rather, this portion of the short story. I never got it done, as I'd started it at around 2am the night prior to it being due, and the class was at 8am.
Regardless of my story's completion, I handed 6 copies of my it out the next morning to the others in the class. In return, I got 6 copies of their respective stories: abusive nonsense the lot of them. There was one that barely resembled coherrent sentences. There was another that lacked any sort of point whatsoever - such as plot, meaningful characters, or use of words that didn't opitomize the typical Valleygirl vocabulary. I've managed to blot the rest from my mind through excessive drug abuse.
The next class resulted in half a dozen people comopletely misunderstanding everything about what was going on. Some didn't realize that the narrator was not "Ed" (the focus of the (partial) story, if you've not yet read it); some made asinine comments illustrating their inability to understand how one sentence follows the one proceeding it, eventually forming a single concept - something most of us know as a "paragraph". Now, granted, the story isn't air tight and isn't even complete, but if you've read it you'll realize that it's a decent enough story. These pedants couldn't see past the stars in their eyes of writting Xena: Princess Warrior scripts (which, if i recall correctly, one of the students mentioned as one of their main motivators into becoming an English major to write).
There was one guy that had good ideas, good characters, and good development, but his ability to form properly written text was a bit stunted. A shame. When he read his stories (as we all had to do) he seemed to accomidate for this negligence, though. But he also never attended class, so...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Larry Clopper, one of the founders of PublishAmerica, responded to tales of some manuscripts being accepted with significant portions consisting of nothing but pages repeated over and over by saying, "People make mistakes. When somebody views a manuscript, they may not read the whole thing line by line."
Sounds like someone could be replaced by a very small shell script.
"Report to me if there is any change," the man's voice said.
." he grated. ." Bruce croaked. "I don't remember!"
"Yes, Dr. Nance," said the sexy voice.
A door closed, and Bruce heard breathing, and smelled the enticing smell of shampoo, and perfume. It was Chanel Number 5.
He opened his eyes.
All he saw was the roundest, firmest pair of tittles he'd ever seen in his life, all enclosed in a crisp white nurse's uniform.
I'm in heaven, he said. No, he tried to say, but his voice wouldn't work, his mouth was dry, and there was some terrible tube thing in his nose--and hey, what's that thing in his dick? It hurts!
The tits bounced like Aunt Alice's molded jello back at home, and then moved away. Oh. She was just straightening the covers on the bed.
Bed.
Bruce realized he laid in a bed, his left arm being strapped down, with something sticking an up-a tube--on the top of his hand.
Bruce looked up. The tits belonged to a beautiful face carved out of ice and whipped cream, with a pair of glowing emerald eyes. Around that perfect face was brown hair like one of those super models, all puffed up.
"Oh, you're awake, Mr. Lucent," said the sexy nurse.
Bruce worked his lips, but couldn't speak.
"Well, Mr. Lucent," the sexy voice went on. "You are probably wondering what you are doing here, honey chile." He realized the voice had the accent of a sexy Southern peach. "You were in an auto accident, Mr. Lucent, but don't worry. You'll be jess fine. This here is the finest hospital in Atlanta, and you are in the care of the finest doctor, Dr. Arthur Eastman."
Bruce tried to speak, but just moaned.
"Now, is there anything I can get you?" Nurse Eastman asked, moving around to the other sides of the bed, and fluffing the pillow.
Bruce wanted to feel those titties, that was what he wanted. Not that he could do much else, he realized. Everything hurt, right down to that thing, whatever it was, in his dick.
"Uh," he said.
Nurse Eastman's eyes lit up like Christmas tree light's. "Now you're talking! Oh," she gave a girlish giggle. "You are recovering jess fine! I have to go tell Dr. Eastman, right away."
"Wait . .
She paused, giggling again. A frightened giggle now. A childish giggle. As though a little girl on Halloween, going door to door, instead of seeing a paper Mackay witch or goblin suddenly was grabbed by the real thing.
"I don't remember . .
"No," she said, shaking her head vehemently. "You don't remember a thing. Now, you jess rest!"
She went to the door, her hips swaying like palm trees in a Hawaiian hurricane.
Bruce lied there in the bed, trying to recover his memory. All he could remember was the screeching of tires', like a steam engine gone crazy, and then there was just all that pain. Hell. Hell on wheels, that's what it was, yeses.
Hell.
On wheels.
Glass Teats! That is a piece of poetry. I thank you!
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I'm a graduate student, the lowest rung of professional academic, in a hard discipline. Before I submit a paper anywhere, I submit preprints to experts within whatever field I'm writing about. I do this because I know the journals will do the exact same thing, and it's far better on my reputation if my reviewers find them than if the journal finds them. I know that it doesn't matter if my name is Alan Matheson Turing or Paul Erdoes--whatever I or anyone else submits goes through a formal vetting process which involves having experts pore over my paper with a magnifying glass.
The Sokal Hoax had glaring errors, errors so large that a college senior in mathematics, economics or physics could have spotted them--not only spotted them, but conclusively proven them to be false.
Social Text didn't catch this. Does it really matter if they thought the paper was of poor quality? They published it, and by publishing it put their imprimatur on it. "Here," they said to the academic world, "read this, we think it's worth your time."
Social Text was right. It was worth my time, in that it demonstrated to me precisely why I'm going for a Ph.D. in a discipline where rigor and peer review actually mean something.
It's true that LitCrit professor are not physicists. Nor do/did they claim to be. They deferred to someone who really was in a position to share expert knowledge, and put it in a context of postmodernist theory.
The postmodernist literary criticism school of thought held that all forms of human understanding were best understood through the microscope of literary criticism. That is, literary symbols and imagery were supposedly a valuable way to study sociology (especially gender and race relations), politics, and even the 'hard' sciences such as physics.
So you had Jacques Lacan writing:
"Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of enjoyment, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image. [...] That is why it is equivalent to the square root of minus one of the signification produced above, of the enjoyment that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of the lack of signifier -1."
Or, from Katherine Hayles, a proponent of the philosopher Luce Irigaray:
"The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."
In short, you mischaracterising Sokal's complaint and the whole point of his hoax.
For more details, please see this book review by Richard Dawkins.
So this is what the editors from Social Text are doing now that nobody reads their publications anymore.
</remove tounge from cheek>
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
More info, and the complete manuscript, can be found here. Be sure to check out chapter 34, which is the computer-generated one.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
Apparently William Shatner has already put it to music
President ISES
(International Society for Elimination of Sigs)
Thanks, dude.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I don't necessarily see why that's a terrible surprise. Just because an author or writer is famous doesn't mean that everything he or she produces is worthy of print. Mediocre work by famous authors may still be published, though, because they have fan bases and established markets that publishers can sell into with confidence. A famous author is a brand name and people who're going out on a limb with their cash like investing in brands.
Being published as an unknown is very hard and you really have to produce high quality work to get bought. Once you've been published, though, you've got a proverbial foot in the door. For a best selling author doors are merely a formality, although I should mention that this doesn't exactly apply to genres like Science Fiction or Fantasy where, except for a few cases, readership is pretty shallow compared to the mainstream and there isn't enough money being made to support an open door policy.
Off the top of my head, Frank Herbert is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. His first novel was absolutely exceptional and it's a seminal work of Science Fiction. He had a lot of trouble getting it published. After Dune became a massive hit, though, people were bashing down Herbert's door for more and he delivered what one might argue was progressively worse work. The only notable books he has really ever written are all Dune related and none of them compare to Dune. Have you ever read the White Plague? It is among the few books I have ever put down unfinished.
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
There are a lot of wannabe SF writers out there. I know, I was one of them once before I broke in, and have done my time in critique groups, workshops, etc. Even in those groups where there were usually some more experienced people, there were those who got desperate and would grasp at any hope at all.
Even though it would cost them hundreds of dollars in one of these scams.
Over the years, there have been many fake book doctors associated with sham publishers. It's hard for me to believe there's all that much money to be made off of desperate writers, but I guess there is enough.
If someone wants to vanity publish, and knows the score, fine, I don't care. No one will buy the book for the most part unless you're one in a million (in which case find a real publisher!), but hey, it's done, and Christmas presents are easy that year. But stealing a few hundred dollars from (often) poor writers and dashing their dreams when they do figure out they've been fleeced, that's awful.
I hope the publicity this produces will help save a few writers from such a fate.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
I think the book is actually pretty good. You guys just need to give it a chance.
If we are going to be talking about absolute crap, somebody should mention "The Da Vinci Code".
There is a reason it's called "pulp fiction" people. Pulp is what your brain turns into.
When I was a kid, we had to wait for the newspaper to find things out. And we didn't read it then, either. Except for the funnies. And there were only three TV stations, and they showed soaps all day.
Then there are places like remote Venezuala where it takes Michael Douglas ten years to find out the Doobie Brothers broke up.
And I'm still waiting to hear who really shot Kennedy. I couldn't figure it out from that movie.
Man, the world was a weird place when I was a kid, just like one of those science fiction novels.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Hey! Imagine a Beowulf cluster writing ... oh dear, never mind.
Nicky Nacky Noo
Tum tum tum de tum
This is apoem I sings a lot
to make me very vary hapy.
I fink it will look good on a poster two.
and a cofey mug to shows my frineds
at work so they no i am an internashunal
poet who mite even winz a prise!
[...]
Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest
Xenu loves you!
"as Ellison pronounces it, "skiffy""
Well, if Ellison said it, then its wrong.
The guy writes once decent episode of Star Trek, and all the sudden, we're supposed to take him seriously?
The guy should give away his stuff on the internet, because I can't imagine anyone paying for it. Stupid old codger.
"Who was I to criticize?"
The truth is the truth.
What you really want to say is "If people's dillusions make them happy, then why bother the idiots with reality?"
when you can have a blog instead. Sure you don't get paid but your 'publisher' never, ever rejects anything you submit.
"I'm going to worry like hell and that's not an easy job, believe me" - Lu-Tze "Thief of Time"
Interactive fiction author Emily Short (under the guise of "Lord Lobur-Bytton") once published a clever little Z-Code multiple choice game that casts you as a writer juggling wild ideas. She doesn't seem overly proud of it, but I really enjoyed it. It was humbling, too - I find it quite easy to come up with cool sh*t, but terribly hard to turn it into stories. Available here (and here as part of the full LoTech comp package).
Akk. apologies if this multiple posted...
1) Get bunch of writes to write "crappy" novel
2) Advertise how bad it is on slashdot
3) Profit!
Just because its horribly bad doesnt mean some of you wont be buying it out of curiosity.
Torrent plz.
> Didn't the same thing happen a few years ago with the people on one usenet
> group submitting intentionally bad manuscripts to some company and get
> most of them published?
You may be thinking of Atlanta Nights, which was submitted to PublishAmerica.
I ran into that story accidentally last week, when I was checking to see what
sort of publisher PublishAmerica is, as a result of having someone out of the
blue send me email at work recommending a book for the collection. (I work at
a public library.) The author is not from around here, so she's probably
mailing every library she can find on the web, hoping to get the book noticed.
It's unlikely to work for her even if the book is good, since most libraries
only purchase books through a small number of suppliers with whom they have
existing accounts, such as Baker & Taylor, Emory Pratt, and so forth. These
suppliers are unlikely to stock anything from a Print-on-Demand source and
even more unlikely to stock anything that can't be returned if it doesn't
sell. Needless to say, I didn't write up the book, and even if I had, it
would have been unlikely to end up in the library collection.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
This is truly a work of genius
?Yes. I will have steak,? said Penelope decisively. ?And I want it cooked rarely. I am a gourmet when it comes to beef so tell the cook not to overcook it."
?Yes Ma'am.? The waiter said smoothly. ?Anything else?? he added.
?French Fries and please bring the horseradish sauce.?
?A Caesar salad for me with blue cheese dressing.? Yvonne decided. ?I am watching my weight.?
?Leave room for the desert. It is our chef special today,? suggested the waiter.
Yvonne could see the people at the next table eating chocolate cake. Everybody else had finished their lunch and gone now from the empty room. ?Yes pleased,? she said eagerly. She had gotten over her fit about the extra vodka."
I was also amused by people asking people things questioningly
It's easy to forget that there are real people whose dreams are being taken advantage of here. Not the publish america people- but their authors. Some of the rationalizations they come up with to explain the sting:
http://www.publishamerica.com/cgi-bin/pamessageboNo, I've noticed the 2-day lag problem, and it's becoming an issue. Boing Boing publishes a lot of these stories days earlier. In fact, I think most Slashdot readers get their submission ideas from Boing Boing. Glancing at Slashdot's front page, I see a story called "Computer-Edited Photos Lead To Child-Porn Locale", which was already covered by Boing Boing. This is becoming a regular occurence.
A friend of mine has had a book published by Publish America. He is a good writer, but his work hasn't caught on with the big publishing houses. Since "his life is writing" in much the same way as many on Slashdot's "life is computers" (I know, I know, don't flame, you know what I mean), he will take publication where he can. He is slowly gathering respect in the small-press world.
The way I understand Publish America to work is that you pay them the initial set-up fee then they'll serve as the publisher and wholesaler for your book. I believe they do on-demand publishing. When a book is ordered, they print it up and send it out. Granted, not all vanity press is on-demand, but this is the basic idea of how vanity press works. I always thought that anyone with enough money could have Publish America print a book for them. Had this "scandal" not come along, I would have continued to think this is the way it always worked.
But why is the rum gone?
Ern Malley
It's an older, more insidious hoax but a goodie. And it bit the perpertrators in the end: the hoax poems popularized the very thing they hated, modernist poetry. They also destroyed Max Harris's reputation but that was an added bonus.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Michael Crieghton's publisher?
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
In case you're not that familiar with English, the author's name, Travis Tea, is a pun on the word travesty, which means farce, parody, or satire.
Yes, I am one of the thirty-odd writers who collectively make up "Travis Tea," a pseudonym (and a pun -- say it outloud). :-)
Here is some background on this wacky collaborative sting project that we cobbled together.
Several months ago, in response to a claim by a certain publisher that writers working in the SF/F genre believe it "does not require believable storylines" or "does not need believable every-day characters," genre writer James D. Macdonald got approximately 40 mostly science fiction and fantasy writers to cobble together an intentionally horrendous monstrosity of a novel (read it here as an FTP download in RTF and PDF format) and then submit it, in order to display the less than discriminating tastes of that same certain publisher in regard to the kind of work they accept for publication.
Earlier last week, the sting has been revealed, the publisher fell for it (retracting the acceptance as soon as news spread, of course), and I proudly own up to having authored Chapter 13 of ATLANTA NIGHTS by Travis Tea .
Here's a bit of an excerpt from my chapter:
Yes, you can even buy your own copy at Lulu.com to read for gut-wrenching hilarity and educational purposes (lessons on how not to write can be derived from the perusal of this book). Here is the stellar lineup of blurbs from the back cover. And that's just the ones that fit the back cover. There are twice as many additional blurbs inside the front matter of the book. Some of them are truly classic....
I predict this will replace THE EYE OF ARGON as midnight panel reading material at science fiction conventions. This book, is purely and genuinely bad. So bad that it's great. In all seriousness, The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest should give it a special achievement prize. :-)
For more detailed coverage, including a list of contributors, of the ATLANTA NIGHTS atrocity -- or should we say, travesty -- see the Cold Ground blog , and Tor Books editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light . ..
Also, looks like the LA Times has picked up the story .
Vera Nazarian
http://www.veranazarian.com/
My uncle just got his published by Publish America. I wonder if I should tell him, he's pretty excited about it. I don't *think* his book was too bad (it was fantasy).
Of course, I think he's found another publisher for the rest of the series, so maybe I shouldn't be *too* worried.
Yeah, and we LIKED IT THAT WAY.
In addition to the free RTF download and the PDF (this URL works only intermittently), you can get a free download in Rocket, Windows, and Palm formats of ATLANTA NIGHTS by Travis Tea from Embiid.com.
Vera
http://www.veranazarian.com/
I've read the book years ago and found it enjoyable. Granted it's not 2001; but it not a gutter rag like Dianetics either. Movies and books are not the same thing. I think you're implying to have RTFB based on seeing the movie. It's generally not safe to make jokes based from ignorance. Of course you may have read the book and come away with this impression. You are entitiled to your opinion.
This is a nice and idealistic view you field here. Congratulations. But now start thinking for a moment: what you describe is peer-review. Editors and publishers rely on the fact that potential publications were piped through a peer-review procedure. You don't believe that all publishers out there have a lot of money to spend on the army of experts you suggest, do you?
So, let's see:
Sokal evaded peer-review, because he was trying to pull a hoax.
Second, he choose deliberatly a periodical that was dealing with an altogether different matter but was willing to publish interdisciplinary papers. Well, i can come over to you and say, publish my new paper on "Neoplatonism as foundation of islamic religion" and i guess as an devotee of *hard* facts you can't tell where the grave error in this title alone is. What you can do is: narrowmindedly decline to publish because this is not your field of expertise or to agree because you are an open-minded publisher, who trusts the peer-review procedure of the scientific community. Back to step 1.
Have fun and read a book: http://www.u-press.de/
If you head over to the Apple Trailers site, you'll see that Miramax has already put out a trailer for the movie to be released in september.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Whenever the Sokal affair is mentioned, I wonder why so few people say anything about the Gordon Freeman affair at the Canadian Journal of Physics.
In 1989, "Kinetics of nonhomogeneous processes in human society: unethical behaviour and societal chaos," by Gordon Freeman (Can. J. Phys. 68, 794-798 (1990)) slipped through the peer-review process and was published in the Canadian Journal of Physics. In this paper, Freeman claimed to use nonlinear dynamics and chaos to demonstrate that feminism was responsible for the breakdown of ethical behavior in society, particularly relating to cheating by university students.
If the Sokal affair shows us that the field postmodernist science studies is full of nonsense, the Freeman affair shows us that physics is equally full of nonsense.
Give kudos to Harlan Ellison as well, who, as I recall, first coined the phrase in the 70's.
If for no other reason, this hoax is important because it points to the deep cultural divide between the Sciences and the Humanities.
Sokal's hoodwinking of the editors and readers of Social Text is more complicated than the real split between what C. P. Snow termed "The Two Cultures" of humanites and science. The issue is in fact complicated enough that it does not compress into anything nearly attractive as the sensational claim that postmodern intellectuals don't know their anuses from a hole in the ground. Still, I'm going to try to point out ways that the popular reading of the Sokal affair ignores some important features of the events which led to the publication of Sokal's article as well as some important questions regarding the final signficance of the debate.
To start, one of the features regarding Sokal's hoax and also GLARINGLY ABSENT from the wikipedia entry is the initial efforts by Social Text's editorial board to have Sokal revise his article. Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins respond to Sokal's hoax in a subsequent issue of Lingua Franca (news of Sokal's hoax was published in May/June 1996 and Ross and Robbins' response in July/August 1996). That response does not seem to be available on the web, but from what I remember it details the dodgy back-and-forth of Sokal and Social Text's editors about publishing the article. Sokal refused to conduct any of the revisions and so the editors of Social Text--perhaps a touch too eager to have a scientist speak on matters normally of interest only to postmodern humanities scholars--published the article without revisions. As Jack Slater would say: "Big mistake."
In other words, the editors of Social Text smelled that the fish was bad, but ate it anyway. It wasn't so much that the article was considered a good one as much as the editors wanted the prestige of publishing a credentialed scientist's views regarding postmodernism, even if those views were a bit cranky.
The issue becomes much more complicated than Sokal's cheer of "egg on your face" circulated by the popular media (especially the web). For one, the editors of Social Text to this day maintain that Sokal's article does in fact have some good points, especially to the extent that it raises problems of authority and validity regarding how disciplines like science produce what is taken as knowledge and fact.
Some of Robbins' articles regarding the aftermath are available on the web, such as his "On Being Hoaxed" and a later article entitled "Anatomy of a Hoax. Both were originally published in separate issues of Tikkun"
The real points of this Sokal affair, in my opinion, are 1) a bad editorial decision was made by editors of a humanities journal, 2) Sokal's unethical trick is now enshrined and will probably be his greatest claim to fame as a "physicist," and 3) the primary tenets of postmodernism remain unchanged because it is too easy to see how culture and dogma shape what people perceive as truth, something that is true not only in religion, philosophy, and cultural studies, but also to some extent in the sciences.
A final real question which tends to get ignored is what would have happened if Sokal had waited a year or two before revealing his hoax. Would a humanities academic have given the lie to the nonsense? I'm guessing the answer is yes, but given the tendency to cull a quick headline from a very complicated series of events, such a question and many others simply get ignored.
blog
What they wrote couldn't be worse then The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis. ;p
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
>> I do wish, however, that Boing Boing would reduce the number of sex ads and tone down some of the other advertising.
Bingo! Somebody @ my office thought I was surfing some prOn site!! Thankfully, Firefox did the trick and got rid of those stupid teen-ads.
Why bother mincing - I got bored reading that thing two paragraphs in. If you lose the reader's attention in a short story, you're in trouble. I hope you've bettered your technique since then.
Of course, it's easy to criticize. (And fun, too)
I followed that a bit, and while there is overlap, it's a more serious issue than Atlanta Nights.
/. article about favorite worst movies somewhere) Atlanta Nights is interesting because of the sex scenes, because you wonder if it takes a good writer to write a very bad book, because it shows the "don'ts" for a writer, and because it is funny in its exaggerations. 'Interesting' doesn't mean 'good'. 'Interesting' doesn't even necessarily mean there is a value to it. It just has to press your interest buttons. Atlanta nights does have value.
I think the writers of Atlanta Nights proved that this publisher sells books that people want to read, and it makes the buyers feel better about it by telling them things they want to hear.
What makes a book an interesting read is not just quality, not even in the case of highbrow interest.(there is a related
Sokal showed a disease in social science. My opinion is , that this disease runs much deeper than 'a few rotten apples'. I hope social scientists did more than just stop reading Social Text, and check why they were reading it in the first place.
You clearly have never been the subject of the traditional rants of the written science fiction community about how they do not write "sci-fi" or "skiffy", which is the domain of bad '50s monster movies. They write "science fiction" or "speculative fiction", which is SF if you must shorten the term.
Funny, as I read it it all comes out as sci-fi.
They must be doing it wrong...
To understand, think "Linux" vs. "GNU/Linux".
More like "trekkie VS trekker".
They sound like the poseurs who, rather than simply be called artists, want to be called artistes. "Oh no! People might get the impression that I write cheesy stories about space monsters, how will I get them to take my epic love story in dragonworld seriously? I know, I'll call it speculative fiction instead of sci-fi, that'll give it that edge of respectability."
I don't care who's a snob about sci-fi, I'm calling the duck a duck, and if they're not happy, I'll call it scientifiction and pretend it's the 20's.
You can't take the sky from me...
http://dialedin.us/boing/
is also useful for a 'clean' version of Boing Boing
Both the publisher and the authors are correct. PublishAmerica is just a vanity publisher, and nearly all scifi authors are lazy talentless hacks.
Stanislaw Lem, a science fiction author himself, said it much more eloquently years ago in an essay that got him kicked out of his honorary membership in SFWA in 1976.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Seriously, once they found out it was a hoax, and discovered the writing talent that contributed to the book, they should have published it right away. It would probably be their best seller. Any attention is good for business.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Ummmm, would that be "inane"?
Speaking of sex, violence, and drug-laden trash, have any of you (accidentally) seen TeleVision lately?
(Not that I would know)
wake up and hold your nose
"Glad you discovered us, on your road towards getting published. We are always happy when a new author has found the way to our door, because opportunity knocks on both sides of it."
This is the start of the text on the author sign up page. They must have had one of their editors write the copy for the web site.
http://www.publishamerica.com/authorinfo.htm
I suppose there are parallels between book sales and karma. To be fair I don't see much wrong with "karma whoring" if it's not excessive.
:
Since you scored so well with your remark, here is my list with karma tips for beginners. World premiere, since i just made it up.
- post early and visible so people pay attention to your post. The second visible person to post the same idea will score less than the first person.
- make sure your message comes across well and fast. In practice this means bring a new nugget of relevant information, or bring mainstream ideas in a clear way.
If your ideas are too difficult, people just stare and pass on. No good points, no bad points. You can't distinguish a brilliant idea that you don't get, from a weak idea.
It would score to bring advanced ideas in a simple way, but you have to be good at 3 things: advanced ideas, clear language, and clarifying advanced ideas. It's hard enough bringing mainstream ideas in a clear way.
- show explicit opinions, but with respect.
People tend to vote up what they agree with, and in a large crowd , 5% who agree is a lot.
They usually won't vote down what they disagree with unless given an excuse.
Just bringing up arguments without an opinion doesn't trigger much.
So impopular is familiar, so it's ok. Unfamiliar is neutral and not ok(so mod 'insightful' is underused). Offending other posters directly gets you modded down, but a (sincere) putdown of a general group gets you modded up.
Your post puts yourself above the masses. Very serious studies have shown that 86.4% of the people like to feel above the masses, so it's a popular opinion with good chance to be modded up.
Well maybe i just made that up, but i would appreciate it if these studies existed.
Don't mod this up. It adds irony if somebody with a low score tells somebody with a high score how to accumulate karma
It also adheres to the axiom that it is impossible to underestimate the intelligence or overestimate the arrogance of publishers.
The fact that some of my best writing is still UNpublished while some of my worst have hit the bestseller lists (like The Da Vinci Legacy) offers a corrollary that it's impossible to go broke underestimating the taste of the average editor.
I am deeply offended and resent your implication that -- hey, look at that bird! Oh look, I must have been reading Slashdot. What the hell is this guy -- hey, I'm offended by that! What is this piece of string doing here?
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Picasso took the check, and on its back, drew in red ink a sketch of the Devil, then handed it back. The message apparently: "Go to hell." And now the check is worth more than its face value.
Moral of the story is that some authors (or artists) are so famous and sought-after that people would almost publish their grocery lists. Its merely up to the professional pride of the authors and the measured restraint of the publishers that this (almost) never actually happens.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I've been self publishing since 1996. I wrote technical books for Que, Riley, Advanstar etc for royalties up to 15% on gross before that. In 1996 I launched an online training site. From which came training CD's sold through amazon. I now publish fiction and non-fiction online and in print. I made $67,000 from self-publishing last year. One year I made $240,000 on a single day in a single licensing deal. A publisher is valuable only if they are going to provide an author with services like _exceptional_ editing and great marketing. Most fiction writers who work with publishers get gross royalties of under 10,000 per finished book (some publishers pay as little as $4,000 for a book). Techinical writers can get more . . . but the publisher usually "owns" the book, and inflicts non-competition agreements which means its like "getting married" to the publisher. I think most writers (particularly technical writer) could make more self-publishing. Anyway if you want to publish print books (which are really quite a low-margin gig compared to ebooks or information sites) check out lightningsource.com. You'll have to buy a block of ISBN numbers from Bowker so you can work with them. Books you publish through lightningsource appear in Amazon and can be ordered in any bookstore. If you want to publish ebooks, which pays a much higher margin, look at ebookad.com. It has a 65% -75% royalty and they handle all fulfillment. You can promote your products through google ads. For technical books, google is great cost effective marketing. (www.google.com/ads) Anyway, my point is that this "hoax" just illustrates that getting a publisher to "accept" your work is a pretty pointless hurdle. If you want to make a living writing, produce good quality work, package it well, get it somewhere people can buy it, and start telling people about it. Use their feedback to improve your work over time. For technical writers with high-value content of use to tightly targeted markets, this is a particularly effective strategy. IMHO
get your post right the first time. "mod 'insightful' is underused" actually had to be, that really insightful ideas are often ignored, while vehement agreement translates to 'mod insightful' .
Pwn3d.
> So you had Jacques Lacan writing:
> "Thus the erectile organ [...] is equivalent to the square root of minus one [...]
What does he mean by that?
The penis is imaginary???
(checking...)
Phew, got me worried for a moment here, mate.
What separates the real publishers from the rest are that they put their neck out for the author financially. They get thousands of copies printed, not knowing if they'll sell, and they pay the shipping to the stores, and are willing to take the copies back if they don't sell (called "returns") for free, even paying the shipping back. Self-published books don't have the margin in them to allow for that. By the time you factor in a little money for the author, the printing costs, shipping, etc. for a returnable book, the cost has risen higher than readers usually will pay. So if you have a market you can tap, terrific, go for it, self-publishing can be your friend. If you haven't the ability to tap a large enough market, then self-publishing won't make you any serious money.
I think this will substantially change for the better with the advent of inexpensive "digital paper" products, i.e. that act like a book in the ways mass consumers want [which ebooks demonstrably don't today -- or they'd sell like paper books]. At the point where you have a "real book" with rifflable pages but digital ink, cheap enough for most folks to afford -- let's say 10-20 years from now -- then this whole picture will change in dramatic ways. But we're not there yet.
And even then: what will remain a constant is the need to get Eyeballs on Product. Marketing and advertising will always be expensive so long as the "human input bandwidth" is limited like it is.
Bottom line, though -- what this sting was about: PublishAmerica makes it seem like all an author needs to do to make a living from writing is get their words into print. The reality is that a real publisher invests a lot of money into getting Eyeballs on Product, and that's the only way most books make any significant money. If PublishAmerica just made it clear how unlikely it was to make money from self-publishing, unless you have the ability to tap into a large market (which very few authors do), I doubt WriterBeware and those of us who are "Travis Tea" would have done this. SFWA and WriterBeware have a long history of helping and educating aspiring authors. Self-publishing/POD is a tool that only works well in the right (and rather limited) circumstances -- but PublishAmerica misleads authors about that, and that's what makes us mad. (If PublishAmerica has 223 new titles each month [78 new authors/mo + 145 second books/mo, from their page at http://www.publishamerica.com/facts/index.htm], each selling an average of say 100 copies over its entire lifetime, selling for say $15 each, PublishAmerica has revenues of 223*100*15 ~ $330,000/mo or $4M/year. Each author, on the other hand, gets an 8% royalty [per PA's contract] from that $15, or $1.20, for $120 total income from their book. Draw your own conclusions.)
If PA quit calling themselves a "traditional" publisher -- or acted like one, vetting work for salability because their neck is on the line and paying out advances of thousa
LA Times covers this well at http://www.calendarlive.com/cl-et-hoax5feb05,0,305 1919.story with the nice info that
;
"To further test PublishAmerica's standards, Macdonald, who compiled the book, left Chapter 21 blank because one writer missed deadline. He included another chapter twice. And he took portions of two other chapters, ran them through a software program that randomly reordered the words, then accepted all the spell check and grammar fixes his software recommended.
The result is Chapter 34, nine pages of disconnected gibberish that begins: "Bruce walked around any more. Some people might ought to her practiced eye, at her. I am so silky and braid shoulders. At sixty-six, men with a few feet away from their languid gazes."
You too can be an author!
I think the difference is that Naked Came The Stranger was an effort to write a well-crafted, but extremely low-brow and tawdry, novel, and see if they could sell it to a publisher. The awful part was the *story*, not the writing itself.
The "Travis Tea" effort, on the other hand, was a deliberate effort to craft horrible prose AND a horrible story, which no reputable publisher would ever publish.
The point is that a reputable publisher makes its money by *selling* the book to readers. They can do this if they buy a well-written but horribly tawdry book. There's a big market for tawdry, and "Naked Came The Stranger" was plumbing the depths to see just how tawdry it could be.
The stung publisher, PublishAmerica, does not make its money by selling books to readers. They get their money from authors, by persuading the author to pay for publication. So PublishAmerica need not concern itself with the quality of the writing or the story. They would probably be happy to publish a book consisting only of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". They'd be happy to publish that book even if it had been disemvowelled. As long as they get the money from the author, PublishAmerica doesn't care if the printed books languish in the author's basement.
Yet they present themselves as a legit publisher, concerned with quality. Thus, the sting.
The cardinal rule for authors to remember, when dealing with publishers, is that money flows toward the author. (I believe that's known as Yog's Law.) Authors do not pay up front for publishing, editing, proofreading, agenting, etc.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
I've heard of people (sometimes original authors) submitting classic literature and oscar screenplays to publishers and getting it rejected. This is an urban legend in publishing circles. This shows you how brain-dead some of these fresh-out-of-school editors are.
This is fiction we're talking about -- that means something false on the face of it, and subjectively interpreted -- not peer-reviewed science.
What these idiot elitists have failed to acknowledge is that there is no universal, objective standard of what qualifies as "good" fiction. Some of the most popular fiction of all time is also some of the "worst," according to snotty critics like these.
What I find most amusing is that not one of these supposed "SF Writers" have even an inkling of mainstream success or popularity. As the old saying goes, "those who can't do, become critics". This might be humorous, if the people involved were actually successful or there was any indication that they knew what SF Readers liked. Instead, what we have is a collection of bitter failures who are lashing out at a public who doesn't share their genius tastes.
These are the same sort of morons who wouldn't give George Lucas a chance when he shopped around the Star Wars idea (and the same ones who gush over the brilliance of 2001, no doubt). They're experts on art, yet somehow their opinion represents the minority.
It ain't news until it's slashdotted. :>
These articles and posts could not have come at a better time: I'm designing a site to host works for authors who wish to publish electronically, offering services both ala carte and packaged: proceeds from sales of works belong entirely to the authors, the only funds I'll get are in hosting, Bowker numbers, and so on...Thank you, Everybody! (Anyone wishing to assist with legitimate SEO is more than welcome to email me to discuss arrangements).
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Since in order to publish it, the volunteer who submitted it as "Travis Tea" would have had to sign a contract saying that they wrote it all. Which they didn't.
Besides, it kind of works better this way - PA get bad press, and whatever expense they might have spent on "reviewing" it (about 50 cents), and people get directed at a more honest "we'll take what you give us and print it" place (Lulu).
(PA don't charge you for the printing, though, so the other reply's not correct.)
So you're the man who japed: excellent stuff. What I'd like to know is, did my favourite SF writer Kilgore Trout also contribute?
it's pretty clear that postmodernist attacks on science are just penis envy from a pseudofield which has no purpose except to give people jobs.
You are clearly defensive about what postmodernism has to say regarding science. You need not be because a deeper understanding of what most postmodernist philosophy has to say about science cannot be characterized as "attacks on science." In particular, the postmodernist assertion that all human systems of knowledge, science included, are affected by dogma and cultural bias is simply a fact. However, science has a system of evaluation that endeavors to correct for those effects that involves non-humans to an extraordinary degree. Bruno Latour, for example, discusses this in both Science In Action and We Have Never Been Modern.
Non-scientific systems of human thought also have mechanisms of correction. Law, philosophy, psychology, art theory--all of these have means of offsetting the bias inherent in human systems. This is not news. Even what you charge to be a "pseudofield" has a means of achieving consensus.
Postmodernism has many facets in the different branches of human endeavor. It is different in architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and music (the humanities). It is generally misunderstood as saying that nothing has any meaning, perhaps deservedly so. But postmodern philosophy in its best forms recognizes distinctions between fields and reveals that all fields are prone to error.
I agree, also, that there are criticisms of scientific studies that "have nothing to do with privilege or dogma," critiques which require "literacy" (what I also would call expert knowledge) to deal with. So your argument with me is what?
There is some real beauty in some of the postmodern philosophers. People like Derrida, Foucault, Irigary, Barthes, and Baudrillard have startling, provocative things to say about the world we live in. They often don't understand science very well, and I definitely would not turn to them to understand the value of a scientific report qua science. That doesn't mean their writing is without value.
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Writing a book, sending out query letters, waiting months for a reply, getting _no_ commitment on how a book will be promoted or marketed when it is accepted, being _expected_ to invest your time in marketing a publisher "took a chance on" . . . that process is expensive and risky for authors.
If you are going to make a living as a writer, you have to learn how to market anyway. Its not that hard for people who write well and quickly.
Actually, fiction books are hard for authors to make "a living wage" off of from every perspective. I think, for a good writer, its probably easier to start as a self published writer (pay for real editing services) learn how to market and sell, develop a readership, then take your books to a "real publisher" that wants to buy the line.
Science fiction, horror, detective writers used to break in through magazine at pennies a word. I figure self publishing and epublishing are 21st century iterations of that trial by fire.
I like EbookAd, LightningSource and maybe BookSurge. I think most writers just don't realize that Publishers don't really decide who the "real" writers are. In the old days they were the only ones who could cost effectively print and distribute books. That is not the case anymore.
In fact most print publishers are facing some pretty hard times. Most don't have capital to take risks even on great books, pay big advances, invest in the cultivation of authors, do a lot marketing, etc.
PA's big mistake is hiring some idiot editor who irritated a bunch of working writers. That is never a good idea :)
You have some competition out there . . . but its a growing market. Actually, I expect many traditionally published authors will be jumping ship as their current publishers continue decreasing royalties and advances, etc.
Good luck with your gig, man :)
Thank you.
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Respectfully disagree, for the typical case. If you have access to a tightly targeted market, sure, you can do it yourself. But for your average fiction book or garden variety non-fiction where the author isn't tied into the readership, and the author's expectation is that it will be on bookshelves across America, it is emphatically not true that one can compete with the major publishers in cost effectively printing and distributing books:
If you want to get your book on the shelves of every real bookstore in the country, you're looking at printing and shipping (and taking back, with return shipping on your nickel) say 10-20,000 copies. Let's go with 10,000 for example. Let's say you go with a trade paper edition from some reasonable POD outfit like LuLu (who probably ties into Lightning like I'd guess PA does too). Setup at LuLu is free -- you plop over your text. (Now, you ought to have paid for real copyediting, and formatting it right for print will take time or you can pay someone, and there's decent cover art, so let's say you put a piddly $1,000 into that. Your cost as author to purchase copies is, say, $8, and you want them in 10,000 stores, so you've got shipping to each store (media rate is $1.42 for a pound or under), plus the shipping envelopes at say $25c in bulk, so let's say $2 each to ship, plus you'll probably get half of them returned (50% returns meaning you've done well!), at another $2 shipping to you, so that's another $1 a copy average to factor in -- so $8+2+1=$11/copy in costs. So, you've printed and shipped 10,000 copies at $11, costing you $110,000 up front before you can see a dime ($111k with your other costs). (That's not counting your *time* in shipping these out -- at 5min a package including time at the post office, that's 100 8-hour days!) Now, the bookstore (or a distributor like Ingram) wants aroundabout a 50% discount off cover price, so if you want to get back that $11 with say $1 profit, you'll have to put the list price at around $24. If you're lucky and sell half of them, you get back, many months later, half your books that didn't sell (5,000 copies) plus payment for those that sold of 5,000 x $12 = $60,000.
Oops, you just lost $50,000.
POD, like PublishAmerica, is only economically feasible if you don't have the copies on bookstore shelves. But if you don't have the copies on store shelves, you have an incredibly hard time selling your book. (In -most- cases; exceptions are as you say.)
How does a real publisher make money at this? Volume discounts: They don't have to pay the high costs per copy for the printing, and for the shipping they lump copies of different titles together. They subsidize losses from titles that don't break even by having bestsellers that sell tons of copies (thus effectively near-zero returns). Yes, publishers often lose money on titles, especially titles from new authors. (Whom they hope will get a following and sell better in the future.)
Sad to say, but as a one-title self-publisher, it's extraordinarily difficult to make a profit. You might make a hundred bucks, but to really sell to the mass public you risk tens of thousands of dollars. Real publishers do this for you, because they believe in the book (that it'll make them and you both money). PublishAmerica is most definitely not a "traditional" publisher. Go see how many of their titles you can find in your local Barnes & Noble, compared to Random House, Tor, etc. (Lucky if you can fine one title, and if you do, chances are it's a local author and only carried in that one store.)
This isn't changing until we have *real* e-books (i.e. outselling paper books), and even then, you'll have to get Eyeballs on Product or you won't sell.
Alas. But it's PA's claims that they are "traditional" -- and the false hopes they create therefrom -- that get people's bile up.
--Andrew Burt
(VP, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.)
Remember a book called "Nasked Came The Stranger"
That was accepted and published by a main line publisher It too was A hoax
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Then there are places like remote Venezuala where it takes Michael Douglas ten years to find out the Doobie Brothers broke up.
Romancing The Stone?
Man, the world was a weird place when I was a kid, just like one of those science fiction novels.
Nay, it was just a looooong ways away...
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
is a pen name for a mutated German Shepard (with an IQ of 200) who uses pastoral pen names such as Trout or Farmer :-)
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
I wouldn't pray when I needed to calcuate the volume under a curve.
I know it's considered lame to reply to one's own comment, but I just wanted to say that I do understand that one calculates a volume bounded by a curve and rotated about an axis. I think my pomo mojo got in the way of my calculus for second there . . .
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Well, now SF fans will have something besides The Eye of Argon that they can use to hold competitions to see who can read aloud further without breaking into laughter...
I think we are in agreement. I think fiction is the most difficult nut to crack. As you know most fiction authors do not make a living off their books, even when they author and publish multiple titles over several years through a reputable publisher. PA plays off the desire many writers have to be "recognized" by a "real publisher". You can't be a "real writer" until a "real publisher" publishes you and your books are in "bookshelves across america". Getting on "bookshelves across america" is a waste of time until you have name recognition. New authors can get that with help from a publisher willing to invest thousands (tens of thousands) in their work. CT Adams is a writing team that just crossed that rubicon. Their book is being promoted well. They got a good advance (low five figures for their first book). I know a very prolific scriptwriter named Zicree who just published a set of three science fiction books that are being well marketed. Note that that in BOTH cases, the writers are working their butts off marketing those books, even though They have supportive publishers who already have them on bookshelves across america. These folks, all seasons writers, cut a good deal for great content with their publishers. BUT, just getting published by any "reputable" publisher doesn't guarantee you'll get that treatment. Many "traditional" publishers are very like PA, handing out low royalties, tiny advances, and with little or no marketing budget dedicated to promoting a book. Many writers find their books "stay on bookshelves across america" for just a few weeks. After that, their work is found on amazon, right next to POD work and they get paid less per copy. If you are a one title writer, it probably doesn't matter where you publish. That single title is not going to support you. If you are going to generate a stream of books and want to make a living at it, you should publish it in such a fashion you'll be paid as much as possible for your work. For many new writers, that used to mean getting their work into magazines. Now it may mean writing ebooks and perhaps doing POD. Getting a book or three printed POD through lightningsource gets them into amazon (right next to all the books no longer available on the shelf) and orderable from any barnes and noble. You can then work on getting them reviewed in newspapers or do book signings for them them at small bookstores, etc. POD requires no purchase of a minimum number of books. Ebooks have no minimum number you have to print, and they are almost costless to distribute (which means they are almost pure profit when one sells). The thing is, you have to do your own PR. BUT most new writers have to do that any way because publishers expect it and because they don't invest many marketing $ in books from new authors. You can still submit new work to big publishers. Maybe one will pick you up. They certainly will if you sell 20,000 copies of your books yourself. They may also buy your other work. "What color is your parachute" was self published originally . . . then sold to a major publisher. Our discussion is not about self publishing or POD, its about Publish America which claims to provide a host of services (including editorial services) which it doesn't appear to provide. It can do this because new writers are told, over and over again, that they _must_ have a publisher (as some kind of seal of approval) in order to be a "real writer".
I think we are in agreement. I think fiction is the most difficult nut to crack. As you know most fiction authors do not make a living off their books, even when they author and publish multiple titles over several years through a reputable publisher.
PA plays off the desire many writers have to be "recognized" by a "real publisher". You can't be a "real writer" until a "real publisher" publishes you and your books are in "bookshelves across america". Getting on "bookshelves across america" is a waste of time until you have name recognition. New authors can get that with help from a publisher willing to invest thousands (tens of thousands) in their work.
CT Adams is a writing team that just crossed that rubicon. Their book is being promoted well. They got a good advance (low five figures for their first book). I know a very prolific scriptwriter named Zicree who just published a set of three science fiction books that are being well marketed. Note that that in BOTH cases, the writers are working their butts off marketing those books, even though they have supportive publishers who already have them on bookshelves across america. These folks, all seasons writers, cut a good deal for great content with their publishers.
Just getting published by any "reputable" publisher doesn't guarantee you'll get that treatment. Many "traditional" publishers are very like PA, handing out low royalties, tiny advances, and with little or no marketing budget dedicated to promoting a book. Many writers find their books "stay on bookshelves across america" for just a few weeks. After that, their work is found on amazon, right next to POD work and they get paid less per copy.
If you are a one title writer, it probably doesn't matter where you publish. That single title is not going to support you. If you are going to generate a stream of books and want to make a living at it, you should publish it in such a fashion you'll be paid as much as possible for your work. For many new writers, that used to mean getting their work into magazines.
Now it may mean writing ebooks and perhaps doing POD. Getting a book or three printed POD through lightningsource gets them into amazon (right next to all the books no longer available on the shelf) and orderable from any barnes and noble. You can then work on getting them reviewed in newspapers or do book signings for them them at small bookstores, etc.
POD requires no purchase of a minimum number of books. Ebooks have no minimum number you have to print, and they are almost costless to distribute (which means they are almost pure profit when one sells). The thing is, you have to do your own PR. BUT most new writers have to do that any way because publishers expect it and because they don't invest many marketing $ in books from new authors.
You can still submit new work to big publishers. Maybe one will pick you up. They certainly will if you sell 20,000 copies of your books yourself. They may also buy your other work. "What color is your parachute" was self published originally . . . then sold to a major publisher.
Our discussion, as you pointed out, is not about self publishing or POD, its about Publish America which claims to provide a host of services (including editorial services) which it doesn't appear to provide. It can do this because new writers are told, over and over again, that they _must_ have a publisher (as some kind of seal of approval) in order to be a "real writer".
What I've read so far looks like the 'crap' appended to spam Usenet posts to evade spam filters. However, I found the story so far somewhat amusing....
What ho old chap, shame you seem to have missed the golden age of British SF when New Worlds SF was still monthly: the argument against sci-fi was being put then, and if I recall correctly the preferred pronunciation was siff.
I remember (vaguely) New Worlds SF (and probably still have some second hand ones in the loft: I recall buying one in particular that had a Brian Stapleford story in it). But I've never verbalised it: I was thinking esseff was the pronunciation.
On the other hand I'm the sort of person who can't remember names unless I write them down, and I'm practically incapable of reading a script out-loud, so, I wonder, is it me who is weird?
Nope - you're the weird ones. Me - I'm normal.
Still, in the post "Star Wars" generation if you say "siff" to someone I dare say they will mishear it as Sith and regale you with tales of light-sabres and how the second trilogy (which came out first) was much better than the first trilogy (which succeeded it temporally but not artistically). Bah - kids.