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.)

Comments

Atlanta Nights

[jonadab]

> 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.

Re:Nothing new...

[jonadab]

The parent is more likely thinking of _Atlanta Nights_, which was submitted to
PublishAmerica. PublishAmerica _claims_ to be a traditional publisher, to
review submitted manuscripts for quality, and so forth, but in actuality they
will "publish" anything, if by "publish" you mean "print". They don't do any
of the *other* things a publisher would normally do, such as edit or promote.