Shoddy PublishAmerica Promotional Practices Earn Wrath of Rowling and Edinburgh Book Festival

The latest PublishAmerica ‘golden pot’ promotional offer to its authors has targeted Harry Potter author, J. K. Rowling. PublishAmerica is never a publisher to miss a trick when a celebrity, actor or author is in the news, fresh with the news of the soon to be launched Pottermore (it’s just gone into beta mode online), PA come tumbling into the party with a $49/69 promotion claiming to bring any author’s book to the attention of J. K. Rowling herself. Indeed, as the PA blurb below tells us that this will happen while a PA delegation is in the hometown of the Harry Potter author.

We will bring your book to the attention of Harry Potter’s author next week while our delegation is in her hometown, and ask her to read it and to tell us and you what she thinks. Tell her what you think: in the Ordering Instructions box write your own note for JK Rowling, max. 50-100 words. We will include your note in our presentation for her!

(via Writer Beware)

I wonder if this motley PA ‘delegation’ operate on the same kind of invitation that got them invited to dinner with Random House. I wrote about that particular invitation nearly a year and a half ago. It seems PA haven’t learned anything since then and I don’t expect this to be the last of this kind of practice. But unlike other literary organisations and literary figures, it looks like Rowling isn’t taking this latest PA self-earning promotion sitting down.

Victoria Strauss, along with ABC News and The Seattle Times, has the full story. This morning, The Bookseller also reports of an another promotional gatecrash by PublisherAmerica at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.