Atlanta Nights

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Atlanta Nights is a collaborative novel created by a group of science fiction and fantasy authors, with the express purpose of producing an unpublishably bad piece of work and testing whether publishing firm PublishAmerica would still accept it. It was accepted, but after the hoax was revealed, the publisher withdrew its offer, and the book was not published at that time.^[1]

The primary purpose of the exercise was to test PublishAmerica's claims to be a "traditional publisher" which would only accept high-quality manuscripts. Critics have long claimed that PublishAmerica is actually a vanity press which pays no special attention to the sales potential of the books they publish since most of their revenue comes from the authors rather than book buyers. PublishAmerica had previously made some highly derogatory public remarks about science fiction and fantasy writers, perhaps^{[weasel words]} because many of their critics came from those communities; those derogatory remarks may have^{[weasel words]} influenced the decision to make such a public test of PublishAmerica's claims.

1 Background
2 Preparation
3 Submission, acceptance and then repudiation
4 Current status
5 Authors
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Background

PublishAmerica describes itself as a "traditional publisher" and claims to accept only high-quality manuscripts for publication. Its website further states that the company receives over 70 manuscripts a day and rejects most of them.

At one point, PublishAmerica's AuthorsMarket website posted an article stating that, among other things:

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... [science fiction] 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.^[2]

[edit] Preparation

In retaliation, a group of science fiction and fantasy authors under the direction of James D. Macdonald collaborated on a deliberately low-quality work, complete with obvious grammatical errors, nonsensical passages, and a complete lack of a coherent plot. The effort appears to have been partly inspired by another collaborative "hoax" work, Naked Came the Stranger: The working title of Atlanta Nights was Naked Came the Badfic^{[citation needed]}.

The distinctive flaws of Atlanta Nights include nonidentical chapters written by two different authors from the same segment of outline (13 and 15), a missing chapter (21), two chapters that are word-for-word identical to each other (4 and 17), two different chapters with the same chapter number (12 and 12), and a chapter "written" by a computer program that generated random text based on patterns found in the previous chapters (34). Characters change gender and race; they die and reappear without explanation. Spelling and grammar are nonstandard and the formatting is inconsistent. The initials of characters who were named in the book spelled out the phrase "PublishAmerica is a vanity press."^[3]

The finale was also crafted to be deliberately bad; not only are all the previous events of the plot revealed to have been a dream (long condemned as a "cheat" ending), but even after this revelation the book continues for several more chapters. This particular fillip was the work of Macdonald, who contrived the entire plot, or lack thereof.

[edit] Submission, acceptance and then repudiation

The completed manuscript was offered to PublishAmerica by an unrevealed person not usually associated with fiction. The manuscript was accepted for publication on 7 December 2004 without comment, despite the claim made by PublishAmerica that "We read every single submission before we accept or refuse."

The contract was reviewed with legal counsel, and the decision was made not to carry the hoax to actually publishing the book.

On 23 January 2005, the hoax was publicly revealed by the authors. On 24 January 2005, PublishAmerica retracted its acceptance, stating that the novel failed to meet their standards after "further editing".

[edit] Current status

The authors subsequently published the book through print on demand publisher Lulu.com (ISBN 1-4116-2298-7) under the pseudonym Travis Tea (a pun on the word "travesty"), with all profits designated to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Emergency Medical Fund. Lulu.com's description of the novel continues the joke: "Atlanta Nights is a book that could only have been produced by an author well-versed in believable storylines, set in conditions that exist today, with believable every-day characters. Accepted by a Traditional Publisher, it is certain to resonate with an audience." Or as Teresa Nielsen Hayden's review said, "The world is full of bad books written by amateurs. But why settle for the merely regrettable? Atlanta Nights is a bad book written by experts."