Atlanta Nights is a collaborative novel by a group of science fiction authors to poke fun at PublishAmerica, a publishing company that is widely considered to be a vanity press despite the company's claims to the contrary.
PublishAmerica describes themselves as a "traditional publisher" and claims only to accept high-quality manuscripts for publication. Their website further claims that the company receives over 70 manuscripts a day, only to reject most of them.
At one point, PublishAmerica's AuthorsMarket website posted an article that claimed, among other things, 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... [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.
In retaliation, a group of science fiction authors under the direction of James D. Macdonald collaborated on the novel Atlanta Nights, a deliberately low-quality work, complete with obvious grammatical errors, nonsensical passages, and a complete lack of anything resembling a coherent plot. The effort appears to have been partly inspired by another collaborative "hoax" work, Naked Came the Stranger, and in fact, the working title of Atlanta Nights was Naked Came the Badfic.
Among the distinctive flaws of Atlanta Nights are a duplicate chapter written by two different authors from the same segment of outline, a missing chapter, and a chapter "written" by a program that generated random text based on patterns found in the previous chapters.
The completed manuscript was offered to PublishAmerica under the punnish pseudonym Travis Tea . 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."
Knowledge of the hoax quickly spread through the publishing world, and on 24 January 2005, PublishAmerica retracted its acceptance. PublishAmerica claimed that the novel failed to meet their standards after "further editing", but more than likely the novel was rejected due to the hoax having been publicly revealed by the authors the day before.
The authors subsequently published the book through print on demand publisher Lulu.com (ISBN 1-4116-2298-7), with all proceeds designated to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Emergency Medical Fund. Lulu.com's description of the novel continues the joke in its description of the novel, "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 one review put it, "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."
The authors of the chapters of this book include:
- Chapter 1 - Sherwood Smith
- Chapter 2 - James D. Macdonald
- Chapter 3 - Sheila Finch
- Chapter 4 - Charles Coleman Finlay
- Chapter 5 - Julia West
- Chapter 6 - Brook West
- Chapter 7 - Adam-Troy Castro
- Chapter 8 - Allen Steele
- Chapter 9 -
- Chapter 10 - Mary Catelli
- Chapter 11 - Andrew Burt
- Chapter 12a - Victoria Strauss
- Chapter 12b - Shira Daemon
- Chapter 13 - Vera Nazarian
- Chapter 14 - Sean P. Fodera
- Chapter 15 - Teresa Nielsen Hayden
- Chapter 16 - Ken Houghton
- Chapter 17 - Charles Coleman Finlay
- Chapter 18 - M. Turville Heitz
- Chapter 19 - Kevin O'Donnell, Jr
- Chapter 20 - Chuck Rothman
- Chapter 21 - N/A, chapter missing
- Chapter 22 - Laura J. Underwood
- Chapter 23 - Jena Snyder
- Chapter 24 - Paul Melko
- Chapter 25 - Tina Kuzminski
- Chapter 26 - Ted Kuzminski
- Chapter 27 - Megan Lindholm/Robin Hobb
- Chapter 28 - Danica and Brook West
- Chapter 29 - Rowan and Julia West
- Chapter 30 - Derryl Murphy
- Chapter 31 - Michael Armstrong
- Chapter 32 - Pierce Askegren
- Chapter 33 - Deanna Hoak
- Chapter 34 - Computer generated
- Chapter 35 - Catherine Mintz
- Chapter 36 - Peter Heck
- Chapter 37 - M. Turville Heitz
- Chapter 38 -
- Chapter 39 - Brenda Clough
- Chapter 40 - Judi B. Castro
- Chapter 41 - Terry McGarry
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