I expect that this amazing tour de force of English literature may be found in the bookshop of one Bernard L. Black, right next to The History of Screaming and the Little Book of Calm.
Oh my god! The internet is scary and evil! Please! As if kids have ever needed help with this kind of thing. Back when I was a kid, we didn't have the internet to help us blow shit up! No! We had to come up with it ourselves! By going to the library, which is an equally dangerous place.
I'm just lucky my dad lived long enough to reach adulthood. In rural Appalachia in the 1950's, there certainly was no internet. There was hardly any TV or books! But being an enterprising soul, he attempted to blow himself up no less than ten times during his childhood, and that kind of can-do spirit is so lost on kids today.
If he had been sitting around playing WoW on the intarwebs, he wouldn't have had time to dump himself in a frozen creek on homemade skis, mix chemicals in glass milk jugs and cork them until they exploded, or coat barn swallow posts with motor oil (in imitation of tree liming techniques he had seen on nature TV-- the birds didn't stick quite so much as they sort of slid around, hung upside down and flapped), or build homemade cannons (he's got a scar from that one), or use a fishing pole and a tin can to interfere with the radar of the bats in the barn, or cause my mother to be grateful to this very day that she only had girls, lest those genes get passed on. (Though I still thank my dad for my own intellectual curiosity, my wondering about how things work, and my ability to hook up four game systems, a stereo, a DVD player, and a VCR all to the same TV without having to look at the directions. And for making Air and Space my favorite museum.)
You don't need the internet to have a little scientific curiosity! or in this case, stupidity. there's really a fine line between the two, and only because it's drawn by the survivors. ^_^;
I engaged in hand-to-hand battle with 'fuchsia' just yesterday. I won narrowly, but only by squashing it with an unabridged copy of the MW dictionary. I suspect there may be more of them in the walls.
Spelling and writing are unrelated skills.
Thank you! That's something I've needed to hear for a long time. I live in mortal terror of spelling, especially aloud; it ranks with zombies and dentistry.
Or perhaps zombie dentists asking me to spell 'anonymous' out loud.
...I'm gonna be up all night with a baseball bat, now.
He was a lucky hamster, to be so loved! I'm so sorry to hear it, though I'm glad there's a new, bright-eyed fuzzbit with a grand and exalted name: Hiro-sama!
We're rodentless for the first time in a long while, as we acquired an active (read: psychotic) kitten after the loss of our last dwarf hamster. After years of tiny squeaking wheels in the middle of the night, and that one year with eight gerbil babies, it's strange to have an empty spot on the mantle.
And the cats, for some reason, have no interest in sunflower seeds carefully hulled in advance.
It took me way too long to find this. Sorry to double-comment.
But personally, I like Shortpacked's take on the FBoFW downturn best.
(I couldn't find it. Eventually I just had to ask Joy when she linked me to it.)
Oh man, thank God someone else is irritated with FBoFW and the publishing plot! The ZOMG DRAMATIC TIMING fire was bad enough, and "wunnerful Elizabeth has so many men vying for her affections tee hee even though she's an adult living with her parents what", but the publishing thing really makes several characters leap onto the back of a shark and do a can-can.
The amount of money wasn't near as obnoxious to me as the fact that Michael just finished writing his draft in December. That and a drooling letter of adoration from his editor--- that manuscript could have been a lost book of the Bible wrapped up in the Arc of the Covenant, and it would still have to sit in a slush pile for months. It's misleading and contrived, and really I think I ought to just stop reading the damn strip because it just makes me froth a little more every day.
But then what would I have to gripe about with my wife?
..also, Elizabeth's lips really bug me.
(#104) Joy, I actually went back and rechecked my records, and at the time I left I was making closer to ten an hour. Of course, that's not counting the $35 a week I had to spend for parking fees. I would edit the above post if possible, and I have submitted that correction to the COD site manager. I don't want to give PA a tiny quibble to invalidate everything else I said. (For the record, even $10 is not sustainable wages in this area, we're too close to major centers like DC and Baltimore.)
It wouldn't have mattered if they were paying me a thousand dollars an hour by that point, though.
Greg (#82) I would have called, for damn sure. Now I'm fortunate to have a wonderful job with a great company that even supports my writing! I weighed posting on the subject of PA for a long time, wondering if I wanted my writing name to be associated with PA at all, if I could be sued, etc. But I realized that if my name turned up along with PA, I wanted it to have me squarely on this side.
Sharon (#83), I'll be happy to drop you an email when I get home this evening. PA employees need support as well, and they're not going to get that from the company. As for former employees, I'm sure we could host a reunion! But we'd have to rent Yankee Stadium to hold us all.
Jules (#84), I'm sure you're absolutely right, and it was really just a distribution center. We had form mails and contracts from PB that were just like the PA ones, only with the money in pounds sterling and the signatures changed to have the PB logo. Our names and everything else were the same. But I think the books from PB shipped from England. To save on postage. Brr.
Thank you, Teresa, for the invitation(75). I'm afraid my response is quite long. I'm a longtime reader of the blog here, and ever since working at PA I occasionally check out the AW forum on the subject-- but this is the first time I've ever mentioned anything publicly. In fact, I find it hard to believe that no other former employees have spoken up. Perhaps they simply don't follow the threads, or just want to forget their experiences? Either that, or very few of them are actually writers so it doesn't relate to them once they don't work there anymore. PA seems to go out of the way not to hire anyone with experience in the field, which is why my resume must have confused them with what they considered a non-relevant degree. Clearly, people who do theatre have no experience with literature or the written word. Ahem.
As far as I recall, I signed no contracts not to speak about the work practices there, and it has been some years now since I was there (my data may therefore be out of date), and they certainly can't fire me now! However, I admit that talking about the experience on a public forum is uncomfortable. I'm well aware that the upper echelon of PA frequently haunts the websites of its detractors, at least in my time, and I see no reason why they would have stopped. I mentioned to my partner, only half joking, that maybe PA would hire someone to shut me up. She retorted, "No, that would cost them money."
Which really sums up PA in a nutshell right there.
All the same, I will try not to directly discuss the people I worked with, and simply tell you about my experiences and the acquisitions process as it stood at the time. I'm sure you can infer the psychological standards of that office, as I frequently in my journal referred to the place as Lord of the Flies Publishing. If anyone has any other questions, I'll try to answer them to the best of my ability and without descending into too much angry froth.
Being new to the area, I was excited and thrilled that there was a local publisher hiring for their acquisitions department. I thought having some serious experience with publishing could give me a real step up in looking for a publisher for my own work. It has, actually, but by showing me everything I should not look for in a publisher. Naturally, with very little professional experience, I figured I would start at the bottom of the department, making photocopies and coffee or something. I should have been suspicious when they immediately had me screening queries.
Now, before accepting the job, I did go to their website and look around. They do a fine job both on the site and in person presenting themselves as a small sort of genre publisher, and I was honestly desperate for a 8-5 desk job with benefits of any sort, especially in something of such interest to me. My sister and her husband both publish under smaller, academic imprints and it seemed very much the same sort of thing. The office at the time was in a tiny appealing downtown brownstone (after we moved to their current cavernous building, the job became much worse), obviously converted from a house. I was delighted. I was thrilled. I was working in publishing, and maybe once I had my current project to my satisfaction, I would have a good shot at getting published myself.
This elation lasted maybe a week, but in retrospect it felt like about nine seconds. My major clue that something was iffy was one morning in the bathroom. There were boxes of manuscripts stacked in there, and one day out of curiosity I peeked in to see what they were. What I found were simply the most horrific manuscripts you can imagine. Terrible fantasy stories that were really Mary-Sue fanfics with replaced names. Religious tracts that were obviously written by flaming zealots. And plenty of people who were just plain crazy. I thought I had found the rejected manuscripts-- no wonder they were stuffed in the bathroom! Imagine my horror when I found out shortly that those were the accepted ones. I stopped mentioning that I had a manuscript in progress, and changed the subject when it was brought up.
The acquisitions process was fairly simple. We got hundreds of queries, and we had to do a certain number of them a day, depending on whether or not we were also accepting manuscripts. By the time I left they liked for us to have something like forty queries done in the morning, and about twenty manuscripts screened in the afternoon. Yes. Twenty. At least. Also for a time, I personally was Publish Britannica. I don't know who or what was really in the office in the UK, if anyone, but all the website queries and manuscripts came through us, in the States.
Manuscripts could only be rejected for a certain set of reasons, all of which were tied into how costly or time-consuming it would be to get the thing to press. No books with too many illustrations, such as comic books or children's picture books. Nothing from deceased authors, nothing previously published, nothing from authors under the age of sixteen-- too many legal things to wrangle for a book PA knew wouldn't sell. "Previously published" to them also meant if you had printed out a couple copies of your book and given it to friends for editing. Nothing pornographic-- at least overtly so, and there was no way of knowing until the thing was read. Which I expect was first done by the author when he received his PA published book. Nothing from certain countries where it would be too troublesome to deal with the authors. Nothing too short or too long-- though if it was too long it was suggested it could be TWO books. And too short was anything under the whopping number of 8,500 words. I've had research papers longer than that, and I'm sure most of you have. Anything with an obvious copyright infringement was rejected, and by obvious I mean if there were copies of Harry Potter actually photocopied, and cited, and encircled with highlighter, stapled in the manuscript. I know I tried to stop things for copyright rips that didn't get approved for rejection by my supervisors, mostly because they hadn't played the videogames the manuscripts were obviously based on, and I had. Second books had to be approved, meaning the first book had to sell at least a couple of copies.
But if it passed those criteria, there was nothing to stop both the query acceptance and the book from getting published. If anything was rejected, it had to be for one of the above reasons and you had to put that in your tally sheet. Any other steaming cowpats that came through and weren't too much trouble to print, 'fit PA like a glove.' Of course.
Manuscript acceptance? Make sure the title hasn't been used before by PA and the email is not that of a blacklisted author. Make sure it can't be rejected for the exacting list of reasons above. Read the first few pages. Read the last few pages. Read a few pages around in the middle, and then find some unique-looking text and perform a search in the manuscript to make sure that there aren't just repeated sections of text. If that's all clear, CONGRATULATIONS. You've been offered a contract. And if you're me, feel yet another tiny bit of your soul shrivel up and die. Now you see how we got through so many a day. At least, everyone else did. I put in extra effort to actually read the damn things, and try to actually answer author questions in emails. But saying to my supervisors, "My cat could write a better novel than this merely by digesting typewriter parts" was not enough to get a book turned down. My artistic sensibilities were summarily ignored, and the book accepted.
Emails should have been quick business. There was a searchable list of all the questions an author would ask, and a trite, cut and paste answer to give. Saying anything else was generally frowned upon, which prevented me from lacing my emails with hidden messages, such as randomly capitalizing letters to spell "OMG RUN AWAY." Lots of bullshit had my name signed to it that way. For example, we often said how the author would have to send off to the Library of Congress personally for registration of copyright, and cover the fees as well.
Everything was done that way, with set responses, from queries to contract negotiations. Want more royalties? Sure, just ask, and they will offer you a slight raise. Doesn't matter, because your book won't sell anyway. Book in bookstores? Well, between us, form letter to potential sucker, bookstores don't ACTUALLY stock books anymore. Not very many of them. Because there are so many books being published, MOST books don't get in bookstores. Really! It's true! You can hardly buy a book in a bookstore these days, but you can get gift soaps and a latte. So sign with PA! A big name publisher couldn't get you in a bookstore anyway. And people bought it-- hook, line, and sinker.
In speaking to other employees, I found out a lot about how the rest of the process worked. To have a manuscript accepted, the author had to provide an electronic copy for PA. PA would not type it from a printed manuscript. Editors? Had to finish editing something like three books in a week. There was no time for a real read-through, though many of them attempted it, and many of them left for other jobs in the space of a month. At best, a spell-check and skimming was all they could do. Devoting too much time to a single work made your numbers drop, and if your numbers fell for too long, well. Sucker born every minute, which means there are lots of them reading the classifieds.
Also during my time there, near the end, I got to help with mailing out of royalty checks. As a writer, it was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life. Most of the checks were only zeros. If they had any amount at all, it was rarely more than fifteen or twenty dollars. Big sellers might have a check for fifty or sixty bucks, and those were really few and far between. How many people waited for those checks, only to get a useless document for seventy-nine cents, or six dollars, or nothing at all.
The big thing I noticed about PA is they were very careful not to do anything that was strictly illegal. Unethical, yes, but you don't go to jail for ethics much these days. That's why they're still out there snaking around. I always said that PA would still do a great business if only they were honest about what they were doing. Because many of those books of course would not be published anywhere else, and many of the authors can't afford self-publish fees, some people could do well with PA. If you're a church group wanting to print a book for evangelical use, or a grandmother wanting to do up copies of your memoirs for your family, PA wouldn't be a bad option. If you're a pompous jerk with a terrible book and think you're better than Steven King (we got lots of those), well you kind of deserve what you get there. PA will publish you if nobody else will. I guess not even PA wants to be known as "Last Ditch Publishing," but surely there is a place for that. There were enough manuscripts there to sustain a good business, and by only printing books that actually are bought, PA never really loses much money on its books. Marketed correctly and honestly, and without the hellish contract, it could put pay-up-front vanity presses in a tight spot.
But if you're a good writer, and think PA is a place where you can get in without fiddling with an agent, and that a contract is a new life for you and your book will be in stores and you can stop writing on scraps of napkins behind the counter of the 7-11, and all those other tight-knit author dreams close up your throat whenever you think about your story, and you have ink in your veins, then PA is the worst sort of misfortune that can happen to you. Unfortunately, it's not illegal yet to rip off someone's dreams.
And that's what made me leave. I was someone else entirely by the end of it, consumed by an awful job, miserable on every level, and certainly I was not writing. I was also being paid only six bucks an hour, with crummy benefits and no paid time off. Even the yearly holidays we were expected to be given were denied us. Christmas that year fell on a weekend, so instead of having the adjacent day be the holiday, we had the day off revoked entirely. I hated every condescending instant I was there, being bossed around by someone who didn't know where to stick her apostrophes; and while I wasn't there, I hated that I had to go back. Finally, after six months and right before some performance reviews, what would have been an unpleasant but short bout of food poisoning turned into a four-day ordeal. I was easily the sickest I have ever been in my entire life. I broke down completely. When I came back to work I had lost fifteen pounds, missed three days of work, and looked like death regurgitated. In that time I'd had nothing to eat except saltines and Gatorade, and that only in the last day.
I was promptly taken into the meeting to discuss my low work numbers, and only at the end did someone say, "Hey, you don't look so good." I think they expected me to be concerned or upset by their reprimand. Inside, I was laughing hysterically. When I gave my two week notice shortly after, I wrote a very careful letter, thanking PA for the position and the time I had spent there. I was as professional as I could manage, and my email was not even answered by my supervisor. I had been written off entirely, and for the rest of my time there I was given a cold shoulder that would not have been out of place in a middle-school girls' bathroom. One of the girls who left shortly after me told me that they hadn't even accepted her two week notice and offer to train her replacement. Instead they had her leave immediately-- they didn't want to pay two salaries at once.
I was jealous. Had I known it worked that way, I would have offered to train a replacement, too. ^_^
Always a delight to see PA being whammied. Not because I was scammed by them as a writer, but because I used to work there. Right in the acquisitions department, no less, until I realized that I should leave for a much more enriching and pleasant career with more intelligent supervisors, such as being a sheep-dung taster.
In all seriousness, it is simply the most miserable workplace you can possibly imagine, outside of some third-world countries. I finally quit after I was told my quotas for accepting manuscripts weren't high enough and that my supervisors worried I was stressing quality over quantity. In publishing! What a notion! (Except they were careful to say they didn't have quotas. They just had "certain numbers you should be meeting daily." Which of course is DIFFERENT from a quota, because of the spelling.)
I pity the employees left behind. Most of them are young, non-college grads who have to eat, too. I wouldn't have been there myself, except we were new to the area and hard up for any income. (They won't interview anybody who looks too sharp on paper. My modest BFA in Theatre Tech must not have been threatening to them. Clearly my partner's degree in English with honors was; she didn't get an interview.) All of the employees have to keep track of daily numbers for how many books they accept or reject. If your numbers fall, you get chewed out. Trust me. At least one person was subject to a daily gnawing in Miranda Prather's office, which was right by my desk. Lovely to listen to while you're copy and pasting rote responses from form letters, the only things you're allowed to tell authors! (To this day when my boss closes a door, I cringe instinctively.)
You couldn't decline books without getting the permission of a supervisor-- supervisors who in my case had less education than me and regularly sent emails with grammatical errors of unfathomable stupidity. Someday I will make a book of them and publish them! ...somewhere else.
When they say they reject 80%, that includes everything they get and don't publish, like single poems and authors who are underage, previously published books, and works that are too short. It's like saying you're cutting back on portions because you didn't eat the plate and silverware.
You can also get your name linked to PA online, which I was flat out not going to do. In fact, it was worrying about having my name tied to PA that really made me leave. I'm a fantasy writer, and the last thing I wanted was for a potential publisher's google to turn me up as a loyal drone of PA. Not when my private blog was blue every day with my loathing of the place: the slimy work practices and the underhanded dealings. Add that to the days when the (single) toilet didn't work, and not getting Christmas off (Promised paid yearly holidays? pfft! What's that? There are authors to gull!), and the fact that frequently there was no heat, and you begin to see what it was like there. Not to mention the petty backbiting and sniping and bitching between departments, and the pure sleazy feeling at the end of the day. True, most of the books put through by PA are really unpublishable drek about "How I contacted the Spirit of [insert dead or living celebrity here] and became his One True Love on the Other Side" or "My uncle's father's cousin's battle with elbow cancer and my poems about Jesus". But the manuscripts that really were good and really had promise always made me sad. Secretly I would rejoice whenever one of those authors slipped away, or realized that the contract was a load of horseshit. Most of them caught on.
After a few months that felt like years, my partner and I finally decided that yes, really, we WOULD rather starve. Which luckily we did not, though now I have a wealth of "negative workplace examples" for any future job interviews. ^_~ When that place finally does go down, my dance card is open for a gravetop foxtrot.
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