As I was driving to weekly time-wasting (college), I heard some excellent music on the classical radio (the less art your kids get, the more it shows) so when I got to my university I looked up the radio’s playlist and discovered the music I enjoyed so much was Respeghi’s 2nd “Ancient Airs and Dances” Suite for orchestra. Seems the old composer stole, I mean used old lute melodies and orchestrated them for an orchestra. The end results sound wonderful, especially that last movement of Suite No 2. I was able to check out the album from my university’s library, one of the only good things about being at a university.
In other news, one of my old high school English teachers had his book published! According to the school’s website, the book is being published by PublishAmerica! A vanity press… I am afraid that is not exactly much of an achievement… their website excited me a couple years ago, but after a bit of research one can see it’s a very misleading company. Be warned! Now, that doesn’t mean the company is necessarily bad if you know what you’re getting into. PublishAmerica will publish just about anyone, despite what their website may say, so don’t feel too accomplished if they accept your novel. And they’re probably not going to really edit it like a real publishing company would. They will not spend any money to promote your book either, other than listing it on its website, so you, the author, will have to do all the marketing yourself… so it’s basically a lot like self-publishing.
Last time I looked into it (about 1.5 years ago or so, maybe things have changed) the company would publish your book free of charge, but request that you tell friends and family members about your book so they could buy it. It was then their money that truly paid for the print-on-demand publishing. If you really got published by a real publishing company, you’d get free copies to hand out to loved ones.
So… hopefully my old English teacher didn’t get tricked (maybe it’s a different “publishamerica”?) and for now I’ll spare this blog a rant about how useless and wasteful high school English classes is… er… are. But someday…
Anyway, check out Writer Beware for all your publishing warning needs. And Google “PublishAmerica hoax” for more warning tales.
I’m still working on my fantasy novel, I’ll have an update about that tomorrow… or the next day.
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