Saturday, 29th of January, 2005

As the PublishAmerica-approved fake Amazon review would probably read, I picked this book up this evening, and I haven’t been able to put it down!
Well, actually I’ve been reading the free downloadble version (pdf | rtf) and have been laughing out loud every minute or two.

The backstory: So there’s this book publisher called PublishAmerica, you see, who claim to be a “traditional book publisher” (see their authorinfo page), as opposed to a vanity publisher. Turns out that they’re really nothing of the sort, but what really enraged a bunch of authors and editors from the SFWA was a statement from PublishAmerica that:

“As a rule of thumb, the quality bar for sci-fi and fantasy is a lot lower than for all other fiction…. [Science fiction authors] have no clue about what it is to write real-life stories, and how to find them a home.” They are “writers who erroneously believe that SciFi, because it is set in a distant future, does not require believable storylines, or that Fantasy, because it is set in conditions that have never existed, does not need believable every-day characters.”

They decided to take this as a challenge, and in the words of their press release, “see where PublishAmerica puts its own quality bar; if the publisher really is selective, as the company claims, or if it is a vanity press that will accept almost anything, as publishing professionals assert.”

The result, submitted under the pseudonym Travis Tea, is the most hilariously badly-written yet compulsively-readable, well… travesty that I have ever seen. It’s so marvellously bad that I’m tempted to go buy it for all my friends. As soon as the hoax was revealed, PublishAmerica withdrew their offer to publish, with the following comment: “Upon further review it appears that your work is not ready to be published. There are portions of nonsensical text in the manuscript that were caught by our editing staff as they previewed the text for editing time assessment pending your acceptance of our offer.”

This is hilarious, because although true (of one chapter, anyway), it ignores the fact that every other chapter is riddled with unpublishable horrors too. The book contains every kind of idiocy that book editors have to deal with on a depressingly regular basis, from appallingly bad grammar, egregious typos and mysteriously changing tenses to wrong usages (e.g. “masseuse” for a (male) masseur), overuse of modifiers (especially in reference to direct speech), empty references, characters referred to by the wrong name, and pretty much anything else you can think of. It also has two chapter 12s.
In short, it’s wonderful!

There are plenty of gems throughout, so it’s hard to choose, but here’s a couple. From chapter 4:

He’d killed a man before one time, with his bare hands, and he could do it again, if he put something in his bare hands like a knife or a gun or something that he could kill somebody with.

Or the start of chapter 3:

“As you’ve probably heard Yvonne,â€? began Penelope Urbain. Seriously brushing a gleaming scarlet tress out of her tearful eye “Bruce has come home from the hospital after his accident.â€?
“Yes you must be very happy,� said Yvonne sympathetically. “He was badly hurt in that auto accident.�
“Yes he was badly hurt,� responded Penelope honestly. “But he is home now and I am very happy about that.�

Chapter 7 is a tour de force, but the best passage would take up too much space, so instead I refer you to this sentence:

They were here only for each other and for the memory of a great man who had walked the earth like a rock in the sand.

…and so it goes…

In case you’re wondering, since PublishAmerica changed their mind about publishing it, the book has been self-published through Lulu.com, a free self-publishing service. Oh - and check out the 5-star reviews PublishAmerica’s books are getting over at Amazon! Then check out all the other books the mega-enthusiastic reviewers are reviewing, and marvel at how they all seem to be published by PublishAmerica! Uh…

More links over at MeFi. I strongly recommend you read the book, for guffaw value as well as edjamacational value. I wanna know who wrote it - other than Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who won’t own up to which chapter is hers but does print someone else’s chapter in full…
Edit: Teresa has now ‘fessed up: she wrote Chapter 15. Meanwhile, there’s now a WikiPedia entry with an almost-complete list of contributors.

One Response to “Tea, Travis - Atlanta Nights”

1. Mary says:
   February 3rd, 2005 at 2:26 pm

   Known contributors:

   http://coldground.typepad.com/cold_ground/2005/01/atlanta_nights_.html