Teena Myers

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Positive comments were made about my Friday night class, so the associate pastor decided I should teach the pastor’s Sunday school class when he had to go out of town. The pastor listened to the recording, and asked Rory and me to meet with him.

He was impressed. “You have the same gift for teaching I do,” he said. They were making some changes. No more meetings on Friday night. They wanted Rod to lead children’s church and me to teach a class on Sunday morning. Rod would begin next Sunday. My class would begin when they started the next quarter.

I had forgotten about the query I’d sent to PublishAmerica when I received a contract from them in the mail. Publishing didn’t interest me, but I read the contract and did some research on traditional, print-on-demand (POD), and self-publishing while I waited for my class to start. The major difference between the three types of publishing is who bears the loss.

Traditional publishers purchase the author’s manuscript with an advance payment. The rights to the manuscript now belong to the publisher. The author has no say in how the publisher produces the manuscript into a book. Then the publisher will print thousands of copies to keep the cost low. The publisher markets the book for about three months. If the book does not sell, they will abandon it to pursue a manuscript that will. The author does not receive royalties until the publishing house recoups the advance paid to the author. Bookstores return unsold books to the publishers for a refund. The publisher bears the loss. That is why traditional publishing houses invest additional money to market the book they purchased the right to sell.

For a long time, if an author could not sell their manuscript to a traditional publisher, the only option was self-publishing, also called vanity publishing. Self-publishing carried the stigma of authors who published out of vanity even though their work lacked editorial rigor and commercial appeal. Many self-published authors lost their financial investment. The stigma made it difficult for them to sell their books, and bookstores would not stock them.

In the late 1990s, technology made it possible to print only the books needed. Print-on-demand eliminated the need for large print runs of books that might or might not sell. The author became the bookstore with nothing to lose except the cost of producing the book. They bought their own books at wholesale to sell retail.

In 1997, Lightning Source became one of the first major POD providers. They were popular with academic and university presses who used them to keep scholarly titles in circulation without costly reprints. Xlibris became one of the first self-publishing companies to offer services directly to authors. They enabled authors a more affordable option to publish. By 1999, iUniverse combined POD with editorial and marketing services. They targeted authors needing more professional support than Xlibris offered.

PublishAmerica advertised themselves as a traditional publisher because they did not charge the author a fee to produce the book. Multitudes rejected by traditional publishers now had an affordable way to be published since PA turned down few, if any, manuscripts. Many cried “scam” when they failed to receive the perceived pampering of a traditional publishing house. The slander was not justified. Their website and contract clearly stated that marketing was the author’s responsibility.  They were not a scam but a new way of doing business that threatened the guardians of traditional publishing.

When the time drew near for me to teach, I picked up the church bulletin and saw the pastor’s wife listed as the teacher of the class promised to me. No one bothered to tell me that I had been replaced. Depression reared its ugly head. Once again, I needed something to keep me sane. There was nothing to lose if I signed the contract with PA, so I did.

True to their advertising, PA produced a book comparable in quality to books produced by traditional publishing houses except for editing and formatting. Whatever program PA used must have removed my formatting before their editor received the manuscript. I had written a teaching book with many Scripture references. In places too numerous to count, the editor failed to separate my words and Bible quotes. She also decided to capitalize pronouns that referred to God but was inept at discerning which pronouns referenced God. I had fifteen pages of corrections that didn’t include the pronoun disaster. There were too many pronoun problems to find them all in the two weeks I was allotted to review the manuscript.

I sent PA the corrections and told them the pronoun problem could not be fixed. They did not apply any of the corrections I requested. I ended up with a nice-looking overpriced book that I could not, in good conscience, sell to others. In my opinion, PA shot themselves in the foot. Why bear the cost of producing a book the author cannot sell? Based on the small royalty checks I received, I doubt enough copies sold through their website to recoup what it cost them to produce it. I made no effort to market the manuscript that became A Reason to Believe, which is no longer in print.

When I dealt with PublishAmerica, they were barely three years old and breaking ground on a new frontier in publishing. They have been much maligned but also had many satisfied authors. The problems I experienced could be attributed to a young company struggling to establish and define itself. Except for editing and formatting, I received a book equal to one produced by a traditional publishing house. 

At no cost to me, I became a published author of a useless book.

TO BE CONTINUED…