“…the right words for the right occasion”
I thank you all for following along with my blog. I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to post as much as I would like.
As I have explored other blog formats, I have been contemplating other avenues for this blog. I will keep you apprised of any changes that come up.
I would like to do so much more with this blog and will continue to investigate the best possible avenues for you to be able to follow along.
In case some of you didn’t know, Preditors&Editors has been fighting against legal action launched against them by PublishAmerica.
Preditors&Editors is a site that is known for providing writers with information regarding those publishers/agents/editors that may or may not be worth working with.
It is strongly-held perception among the mainstream writing industry that Publish America has a reputation for publishing anything, whether or not it worth publishing or not. Unfortunately, it is this reputation that has gripped the entire self-publishing world. With self-publishing, everybody and his dog can get published without having to even edit or learn about the craft of writing – verb tenses, point of view, grammar, punctuation.
PublishAmerica has led the way in this regard. But, they are not by any means the only ones we need to be careful of.
Anyway…Preditors&Editors has made it no secret what their opinion is of PA, based on the information they’ve received from past clients. PA didn’t like the comments, so in true American fashion, they sued P&E. A similar thing happened to the site AbsoluteWrite.
Yesterday, I learned that PA has “won” in the latest battle and that P&E has been asked to pay $250,000 in fines.
Has it now become a crime to warn people about companies that might or might not have a good reputation? It isn’t P&E that has bookstores turning down anything with PublishAmerica on the spine. It isn’t P&E that has respected book reviewers not looking at anything that is self-published. It isn’t P&E that is hunting down those people who had a bad experience PublishAmerica. Quite the contrary. PublishAmerica has done this to themselves, and unfortunately have negatively affected the self-publishing brand so that anyone that’s self-published has to swim upstream just as much as if the writer had pursued the traditional publishing route.
In a writing world where publishers are laying people off and new writers are not being picked up, we can’t afford to have businesses and writers that are just out for themselves. There have to be standards adhered to to make a business successful and reflect well on the industry.
In the real world, if someone criticizes your quality of work, you learn what you need to to change it and improve your output. Unfortunately, in the writing world there are a bunch of writers and publishers (not just PublishAmerica) who do not feel that they need to change a thing and these are the writers and publishers that take away a valuable opportunity for those writers who work hard to hone their craft and produce excellent books that the traditional publishers pass up – I have read several.
This perception of the self-publishing world will not change until companies like PublishAmerica and others buck up and do something to change their business practices and improve their reputation. It’s going to tough, yes, but it needs to be done. PublishAmerica has the power and influence to provide worthy writers with the chance to see their name on the cover of something they’ve worked hard for. Instead of spending money on suing the messenger of bad news, they should heed the bad news and lead the self-publishing industry to a level of respect and integrity.
