Publishing Experience with Algora

I obviously had no idea what to expect when I completed and copyrighted the first draft of the book. It was a grueling task to find not only non-fiction publishers to submit to with the most notable of them being the likes of Verso, Pluto, AK, etc. The biggest issue at hand was finding publishers that are open to first time authors while at the same time also catering to the critical/thesis based non-fiction writing I had just completed. Regardless, I submitted the book to whatever non-fiction publisher I could find, with none of them them accepting my book, with just a tiny fraction of them even willing to write back to me. In one case, there was a publisher that did write back to me about not accepting my book and was willing to admit that they actually liked my book and understood the points I was making, but turned me down purely on the basis that they are a “scholarly” publication and did not accept the book on this ground alone.

This, of course, brings us to Algora Publishing. After five years of becoming a bibliophile in terms of non-fiction, the only time I ever heard of Algora was when writing this book and finding publishers to submit to. Just a little over a month after starting submitting to publishers, Algora had already made on offer on the book. I had no idea what to make of it as I was still deep into the process of submitting to other publishers, so I basically just ignored it so I could continue to submit to other publishers for the rest of the year.

When the next year came about, Algora contacted me again, obviously wondering about my lack of response to their offer. I told them that there was a family health scare at the end of the year along with the holidays and that’s why it took so long for me to get back with them. Even though this was true, it was also because I wanted to continue to submit to other publishers to expand my options. It was also because I did my own research on Algora and the people who published them didn’t have that many nice things to say about them. This was especially the case of author JJ Dyken and the author’s book The Divine Default. With the book being a critique of religion, it inevitably has a critique of Islam and the geopolitics of the Arab World. This is where Algora’s chief editor, Martin, incessantly clashed with the author over his critiques of Islam, revealing Martin’s pro-Islam bias that goes into the extreme. The result was Algora severely changing and truncating his book and misinterpreting it’s message. So much so, that Dyken wanted to rescind the contract and have the copyright returned. Not only that, there were other issues such as many typos throughout the book still being in the final print along with Martin’s overall snarky, condescending disposition. His experience with Algora can be found here: http://www.thedivinedefault.com/algora-publishing

This experience will obviously make anyone apprehensive about publishing with Algora. I had to look at my own book and see if such an experience would happen to me if I published with them. My book only makes brief mentions of Islam or the Arab world, but from a historical and neutral perspective. When I did make a critique of religion, it was from the broad perspective of Abrahamic religions as a whole. From that, I felt that I was safe from having an experience as terrible as the one JJ Dyken went through. After the passing of the new year, it was quite obvious that no other publisher was going to get back to me, let alone make on offer on my book. With Algora being the only one to do so, I took the plunge and signed the contract with them.

The editing process first began with the editor Andrea. The experience with working with her wasn’t that pleasant as I immediately noticed that she was changing things that had nothing to do with grammatical errors or typos whatsoever. The worst part (up to that point) was she kept on trying to truncate the final paragraph of the first chapter that serves as a lead-in to the next chapter and for no apparent reason. Much more time was spent undoing her changes to sentences that were perfectly fine as opposed to finding grammatical errors, formatting issues, or typos. There were really only a handful of times where Algora’s editors noted verbiage that seemed off or perplexing, leading me to change the wording to be more practical and to-the-point.

But things got far worse when when we got to chapter 6 which is about surveillance, as it was quite obvious that this was when Algora’s chief editor Martin started in intervene with Andrea becoming more of a “middle man” editor. The chapter does a thorough rundown of modern surveillance in Western culture. This is to then make a contrast with surveillance in a non-Western country to then reiterate the “Huxleyan” (Western) and the Orwellian (non-Western) approach to dystopia-which serves as a major turning point in the book in terms of the themes of the second half. In order to establish this, the non-Western country I chose was China. There are plenty of academic books detailing China’s massive surveillance state that rivals that of Orwell’s Big Brother that have never been disputed or discredited. One of which is Geoffrey Cain’s The perfect Police State that is a in-person account of the surveillance state within the Uyghur interment camps. As I own that copyright of the fist two drafts of the book with this segment intact, I will include these paragraphs about China here (starting on what is now page 64):

“As it happens, Orwell’s totalitarian surveillance state exists right here and now in China.  The Chinese government has subjected over a million of China’s Uyghur Turkic ethnic minority in the region of Xinjiang to what Geoffrey Cain has described as a “perfect police state” in the form of internment camps with the most totalized surveillance the world has ever seen.5 China’s totalitarian police state in Xinjiang and its utilization of brute force to establish the openly direct and totalized surveillance of the Uyghur people is the most accurate depiction of the surveillance police state found in Orwell’s 1984. So much so, that during Cain’s investigation of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, he gave a copy of 1984 to them and they were astonished that a book written over seventy years ago had predicted their own present experience. And did so with such accurately that “George Orwell saw the future. He saw our world.”5  

For the rest of its population, China uses much more subdued, yet still quite dystopian methods for imposing a surveillance state. Overall, China has an estimated half a billion surveillance cameras to spy on its citizens, which even its own people have already derided as “Skynet” in reference to the Terminator films.6 China also uses a decentralized, yet quite totalizing, form of surveillance with its system of “Social Credit”. Under this system, people’s data is collected and then ranked based on their level of “trustworthiness” (i.e. subservience to the state). Those ranking high on the social credit system are given special privileges such as VIP bookings at hotels and car rentals. But those ranking low on the system suffer dire consequences such as being blacklisted from things such as bank loans, apartment rentals, transportation, and even employment.7”

(5: Geoffrey Cain: The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future, P. 157 6: Isabelle Qian, Muyi Xiao, Paul Mozur and Alexander Cardia, Four Takeaways From a Times Investigation Into China’s Expanding Surveillance State, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/21/world/asia/china-surveillance-investigation.html 7: Charlie Campbell, How China Is Using “Social Credit Scores” to Reward and Punish Its Citizens, https://time.com/collection/davos-2019/5502592/china-social-credit-score/)

This is where Martin’s head exploded as he completely denied the existence of the Uyghur interment camps. Not only did Martin not do anything to disprove with existence of the Uyghur interment camps, he also never disproved the validity of the sources-only making an attempt at dismissing Geoffrey Cain as a mere “influencer” rather than an investigative journalist who was writing directly from his accounts of being in China himself.

I was obviously completely taken aback by this. As I had already known about Martin’s pro-Islam bias, I though my book was safe from his buffoonery in that regard. I never would have thought he also had a pro-China bias as well. Whether Algora is truly an independent publisher or one that takes it orders from the CPC, I don’t know. But I pulled no punches at their denial of the Uyghur interment camps and called them out at how pathetic their attempts were at dismissing Geoffrey Cain as a reputable source and their lack of actually disproving anything I said about China at all. Remarkably, this didn’t actually start an all out war with the publisher. Andrea was surprisingly able to move on from the issue and continue with the editing process with the rest of the book. This is were things took a different turn in that there was again almost no emphasis on grammatical errors or typos, but instead on outright censoring the book. They were flat out bleeping out words that were not mine, but quotes from others. Any language that was above a PG rating was being censored, as if I was writing a book for children and being published by Disney. The worst part was in the final chapter with their censoring of David Graeber’s concept of “bullshit jobs”. They literally tried to censor that as “lousy” jobs, as if adult readers wouldn’t be aware of censoring the actually name of someone else’s theory that’s also the book title. As with the dispute about China, I didn’t back down when calling them out for their blatant censorship-reminding them just how preposterous it is to censor the words of someone else’s theory-one that was published with the phrase “bullshit jobs” as the title of the book that’s right on the front cover and is published by one of the big five. With that, I continued to denounce their censorship of the book as it insults the intelligence of the adult audience and dismantles the integrity of my book.

I didn’t hear back from them in a while, for what seemed like weeks. Maybe they weren’t used to authors who were willing to stand up for themselves and their book to the extent that I did-or maybe they didn’t know how to respond. The gap was long enough that I simply continued to edit the book on my own. Eventually, Martin finally did write back and predictably, his head exploded again. With his usual manipulative tactics, he tried to make me feel guilty by insinuating my previous email was directly solely at Andrea. I obviously did not fall for this as she had turned into the “middle man” editor long ago with Martin taking the helm on the book since China incident on chapter 6. He again made an attempt at dismissing the Uyghur interment camps as “crap propaganda” (an Orwellian tactic if I ever saw one), only to quickly change the subject to Gaza, which has nothing to do with my book. Then, he provided links of videos of the Uyghurs having a happy-go-lucking time; in a vein attempt to insinuate those videos do anything to disprove existence of the Uyghur interment camps and as if the videos of the actual interment camps themselves somehow don’t provide proof of their existence (I never actually brought up these points to them, as I knew how futile it would be to argue with Martin on this).

From that, it was becoming quite obvious that the censoring of the book was retaliation for writing that segment about China. I was well aware that I didn’t want my book to suffer the same fate as JJ Dyken, so I new better than to go into an all out war with Algora about the topic of China when it’s a topic that only consists of a mere two paragraphs. As a result, I did the best I could to make a compromise by simply changing some of the writing of that paragraph on the Uyghur interment camps by not mentioning them explicitly and instead referring to China in the most generalized way that I could. This compromise changed everything as when we got back to editing the book, suddenly all that blatant censorship disappeared-especially since I was willing to tone down the language of the quotes to a PG-13 scale by taking out some of the more vulgar or R-rated language the quotes may have had.

That’s when we were finally able to move on to the final step of finding and fixing any typos we found throughout the book. While there were a few cases of the editors finding typos themselves without my involvement, unfortunately, Algora expects you the author to find these typos and relay that back to them. If it gets to that level, you would think that things could be made simpler by letting me directly edit the master file so I can directly fix the typos myself, but Algora refused to do so. Regardless, we finished fixing the typos of the first half in the middle of May and finished fixing the typos of the last half on the last week of May to finally finish the book.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. There was already an anomaly in that the Amazon listing shows that it was published on May 15, 2025-which is not true as we had only finished half the typo fixing by then. That should have been a warning to me, as when I did acquire the book for my self, I discovered that the last half of the book still had those typos we found still in the book-never actually being fixed. Sure I could have felt embarrassed, that I might not have scrutinized the “final” PDF version of the book they gave me enough to realize all this. But the issues with typos still being in the book is still on them for giving me the master file that still didn’t have those typos fixed in the first place-let alone that it is their job to rectify these types of issues to begin with rather than having them fall on the author.

That’s when things finally came to an end with working with Algora. If it wasn’t for reading about JJ Dyken’s experience with Algora, I never would have been prepared to deal with everything Algora threw at me. With how terrible Dyken’s experience was, I knew better than to go to war with Algora over a few paragraphs about China due to Martin’s crackpot views on topical international issues and his snarky, condescending attitude he has towards authors who cross those issues with him. But of course there are plenty of silver linings here. Just two paragraphs were sacrificed in the book with the everything else left intact, especially in terms of the actual thesis and arguments I am presenting in the book. With that, Algora provided their own summaries of the book on the website and on the book itself-and much to my relief, their summaries of the book were exceptionally accurate as to what the book is about. It couldn’t have been any more of a weight off my shoulders that Algora ultimately had a thorough understanding of what my book is about when providing a summery to the public without any arguments with them in that regard throughout the entire course of working with them.

So there you have it. There were plenty of twists and turns when dealing with Algora. Obviously, there was the debacle with them having a pro-China bias-which lead to a mere two paragraphs being truncated from the book while they still had the overall understanding of what the book is about. With everything that JJ Dyken experienced, I guess I will have to consider myself lucky with how the book came out. After all, they were the only publisher that even made an offer on my book (which, of course, I never told them). Obviously, many publishers are simply overwhelmed by submissions and can’t even write back that they are turning it down. But outside of that, any of the other publishers simply might have invoked the credential card as a way to dismiss my book (an issue I spend two paragraphs on in the first chapter should that be the case). From there, it appears that Algora is effectively the only non-fiction publisher that is willing to take on first time authors regardless of credentials, even when the book is in the “critical/thesis” based category that academia has monopolized.

As much as Algora can be praised for doing all this, it’s actually apart of the problem; Algora knows all to well that they fill this specific niche to the point of holding a monopoly on it themselves-leading them to exploiting this advantage over first time authors to potentially take advantage of them or just be a douche to them. Either way, if you are a first time author of critical based non-fiction, than by all means consider Algora. But just be warned that they should be considered a last resort due to the risk of facing a war with Martin over your book’s mention of Islam or geopolitical issues but more importantly, their incompetence when it comes to doing the basic aspects of their job such as fixing typos. Every author and every book is different-the choice will fall on you.