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Atlanta Nights is a collaborative novel created in 2004 by a group of science fiction and fantasy authors, with the express purpose of producing an unpublishably bad piece of work, so as to test whether publishing firm PublishAmerica would still accept it. It was accepted; after the hoax was revealed, the publisher withdrew its offer.
The primary purpose of the exercise was to test PublishAmerica's claims to be a "traditional publisher" that would only accept high-quality manuscripts. Critics had long claimed that PublishAmerica is actually a vanity press that paid no special attention to the sales potential of the books they published, since most of their revenue came from the authors rather than book buyers. PublishAmerica had previously made some derogatory public remarks about science fiction and fantasy writers. In light of the fact that many of their critics came from those communities, those derogatory remarks influenced the decision to make such a public test of PublishAmerica's claims.
At one point, PublishAmerica posted articles on their AuthorsMarket website stating that, among other things:
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 (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 and the formatting is inconsistent. The initials of characters who were named in the book spelled out the phrase "PublishAmerica is a vanity press."
Under Macdonald's direction, the denouement, which takes place in the middle of the book, revealed that Dream sequence, although the book continues for several more chapters.
On January 23, 2005, the authors publicly revealed the hoax. PublishAmerica retracted its acceptance the following day, stating that after "further review" the novel failed to meet their standards.
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