Some months ago, the excellent James D. Macdonald, who (like those superlative crusaders, Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss) is always on the watch for scams to rip off new writers, proposed a sting aimed at PublishAmerica, specifically at their false premises.

I should say that I have no objection to vanity presses--the ones who are honest about the goods and services they offer. A vanity press, in fact, is perfect for some projects, where writers of niche books need a printer so they can take the product to an audience they know is waiting: a friend did this with a book about the life of an early twentieth century car designer. She had it printed by a reputable vanity press, took the book to rare car shows, and make a tidy bundle--so successful I believe she went back for a couple of printings before her market tapped out.

What I loathe and despise about PA is that their advertizing tries to suggest in every way possible short of actual promises that they distribute the book--that going with them will get your book into the big book chains.

They also claim that they reject a lot of books, and only pick publishable books. Oh yeah?

So I volunteered to join this project: I was give a couple of names and a line or so of plot. I did not know where my portion would fall in the story. I sat down and as fast as I could, generated several pages of dreck, making sure to use bad grammar, terrible punctuation, as well as POV bobbles, maid-and-butler dialogue, every worn out phrase I could remember.

Well, a day or two ago, the people running the sting got an acceptance letter (which can be seen on the "see pdf example" bar on the web-page below) for this fumous reekaroo, so bad that my middle actually hurt from laughing when I paged through the, ah, "work", put up for the first time yesterday. Nobody knew how many writers were involved, no one knew what the plot was--where their story would fit--and writers participating ranged from long-time authors to a couple of kids in high school.

Anyway, as soon as word started proliferating out from SFF.NET yesterday, the PA people quite naturally caught wind--or whiff--and apparently rescinded their acceptance, claiming the, ah, book is "not ready yet."

So the sting can't go all the way to the end. But the originators have been encouraged by others, reading samples of this pinnacle of squalidity, to print it anyway, and sell copies for fund raisers, like the SFWA Emergency Medical Fund, which is the current plan.

So anyway, here is the link for anyone curious to check it out. (BTW, it turned out the opening chapter is mine)

http://www.lulu.com/content/102550

Edited to add: beth_bernobich has more links here