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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 because many of their critics came from those communities; those derogatory remarks may have influenced the decision to make such a public test of PublishAmerica's claims. BACKGROUND PublishAmerica describes itself as a "traditional publisher" and proclaims to only accept high-quality Manuscript s 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: 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''. 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. The initials of characters who were named in the book spelled out the phrase "PublishAmerica is a vanity press."http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1032467&postcount=44 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. 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". CURRENT STATUS The authors subsequently published the book through '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." AUTHORS The authors of the chapters of this book include:
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