Question EVERYTHING

I keep hoping to get my foot in the door of the publishing world. To be quite frank, I want to be a published writer so bad I can taste it. ( In reality, I'm positive it tastes like chocolate!)

A couple of weeks ago, I responded to an ad I found- Publisher seeks new writers- all genres, reply to------. It turned out to be a company called Publish America. They sent me an e- letter from the " Acquisitions Department", offerring to look at my first three chapters and an outline, and showed me all their authors' names, and that some of their writers had won Pulitzer Prizes, and all kinds of things. They even offered a "small advance" if my work were accepted. A "small advance" is ONE DOLLAR. I find that insulting, and not a comfortable image of the company I almost worked with. One measly dollar does not show much faith in their abilities to sell my work, does it? Nor does it say very much for my work to accept a one dollar advance.

. Companies like these- subsidy publishers- sometimes get contracts to keep a published writer's book in print after the orginal contract has ended. They also offered me the privilege of keeping the copyright. What the hell is the point of keeping the copyright? I always believed that writers made money by SELLING the copyrights to a book, for so much money, and a percentage of royalties and residual rights, as well as keeping the byline on the book. Pay me. You can HAVE the copyrights.

Now, Publish America claims not to "charge authors for anything, ever", but I did see that they expect an awful lot of work, read, " money" to begin advertising in your local area. They have been sued by many authors, and lost almost every time. They published a book with the same sentence- just one- written a few thousand times. Wikipedia didn't even have anything nice to say. Hell, their own writers' forum had so many posts from disgruntled, disappointed and disillusioned authors, it was a shame. They really should be embarrassed to dream of the scamming they pull on authors. Publishing houses are in the business of buying manuscripts to PUBLISH, for us, the public, to BUY, for the COMPANY, and the AUTHOR to make money. They have so many manuscripts submitted each day, and so many authors in print, that they don't need to solicit new talent. As a matter of fact, most reputable houses do not accept email submissions, nor do they even consider a work not submitted by a literary agent.

Well. As I had told several freinds that I had been solicited by an " actual publishing house" for my novel, I now had to go back and tell them it was a false alarm. Embarrassed? Oh, yes. BUT- if the worst I got was a little embarrassment, then I'm doing pretty well. Now I know where to start. I have to find an agent. I have to start at square one. I'm o.k. with that. At least I didn't sign a contract that locked me into a vanity press for seven years, and knocked myself out of real money, and the opportunity to EVER be a member of the Author's Guild, or to be even glanced at by a real live publishing house.

What I did gain from this experience was to learn to Question EVERYTHING, and to save ( hopefully) someone from feeling like a moron when they trip over their own two feet. Everybody may have seen me fall on my butt, but everybody saw me get back up and try again, too. Its not too shabby...