Crazy Literary Fact of the Day: Some Authors Collaborated on an Intentionally Awful Book

Posted by Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, Managing Director, Editorial, Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc.

A book titled Atlanta Nights was written by a group of sci-fi authors to be intentionally bad as a test for the publisher PublishAmerica (now America Star Books). They collaborated on the work as a test case to see if PublishAmerica's claims that it was not a vanity press but a legitimate traditional publisher with high standards for literary content were true.

The awful book included a chapter containing computer generated random sentences, and chapter 17 and 4 are word for word identical. The publisher accepted it.