Hat tip: Alice West
Nicky managed to get a gig doing some layout work for another writer’s book. Mercifully, the cover art is not his, but the design and layout are classic Nicky.
Note the accent grave on the front cover:
Note the accent aigu on the first page inside:
Also note the overlapping hard-to-read fonts, and the “edited and arranged by” section. Because it’s all about Nicky, and the software he used to work his, er, magic. I’m curious to know whether the cover or first inside page is correct for the author’s name. An accent aigu would be the norm. It’s difficult to read the author’s name at the top of each odd-numbered page, but I believe it shows an accent aigu. Whichever is correct, it’s far from the first time Nicky has misspelled an author’s name. Heck, he’s misspelled his own name a number of times on his own covers, as well as misspelling authors’ names in his anthologies’ tables of contents. I’m also curious to know why he felt it necessary to include her date of birth, although he does seem to have an obsession with that.
Finally, the listing on Amazon shows the author biography section for … Nicky himself, instead of Ms. Bejarano.
Way to go, Peaches. Make it all about yourself instead of the author, even though she wrote the book.
If nothing else, let this be a warning to people not to hire Nicky to do any design or layout work for you. And, never, ever hire him to do editing. He’s hard pressed as it is to string together a coherent sentence, except by accident.
Disclaimer: This entry is not meant to critique anything about the content of the book. It is only meant to comment about the poor layout and design work done by Nickolaus Albert Pacione, and his opportunistic use of self promotion at the expense of the author. My opinion was formed by looking at the Amazon listing, and the “look inside” function.
God, I feel so sorry for Ms. Bejarano. 🙁
Amen to that.
The world needs to be warned about Nickolaus Pacione. This unfortunately proves that there are people who do not know to do detailed research on Pacione (or well, anyone) before hiring him.
Which book buying browser looking at the Amazon page for “The Gateway” by Aimee’ Marie Bejarano needs a wall of text all about Pacione? This book’s Amazon”Editorial Review” is by Pacione about Pacione. The “All About the Author Biography” is Pacione’s Amazon Lake Fossil Press Biography. Grrr.
This is as if the guy who put the frame on the Mona Lisa spray painted his signature across the face of the portrait.
The “More About the Author” section unquestionably should have been about Aimeé, not Nicky. It’s possible Nicky interpreted that part to mean “the author of this listing,” rather than the author of the book, but my god, does it take an incredible amount of stupidity to misinterpret that. Heck, he’s not even the publisher.
Amazon’s “The Gateway” page “More About the Author Biography” is NOW Aimee’ Marie Bejarno’s biography and not Nickolaus Pacione’s biography.
The back cover is poorly designed as well, you can hardly read the blurb and I had to practically put my nose to my monitor to make out the price in what appeared to be an empty silver box set at random. There’s just no flow to it at all.
By looking at the author’s other book, which Nicky had nothing to do with, I can confirm it should be an accent aigu. The difference between the covers for the books is like night and day and while her prose is not my cup of tea I do hope she finds a decent editor/designer for her next book.
Yeah, even after zooming in three times, it’s very difficult to read the $12.00 cover price. I thought it was just a box with a couple of diagonal lines until you mentioned that it contained the price. Yellow text on a white background would have been easier to read.
Nicky’s been busy lately. Like I mentioned under the RayJay thread, he’s also pillaged a Robert Bloch book.
http://www.amazon.com/This-Crowded-Earth-Robert-Bloch/dp/1517237572/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1443544714&sr=1-10&keywords=nickolaus+pacione
No “look inside” feature for that one, but I can only imagine.
I feel bad for Ms. Bejarano. Did she not check into his other work before hiring him? Hope she didn’t pay much for that.
I’m almost positive he wrote the bit before the Table of Contents, too, because it’s (A) incoherent and (B) references the Twilight Zone.
“Welcome to a weird world where this is New York City — as reality is born witin (sic) the depths of nightmares. This is the imagination collected within the author as this well it’s submitted for your approval.”
The main text of the novel has some stylistic problems of its own, but they’re different than Nicky’s.
I’ve seen a few other people on Twitter thanking him for things, so Nicky may be screwing up some others authors’ books as well.
Look Inside is working now for those curious about Nicky’s intro, of course it’s mostly about him with a soupcon of whining about real writers.
Currently this morning amazon.com (USA) and amazon.co.uk look insides show a one page intro by the author.
The credit line on the Amazon page briefly flashed a third credit Nickolaus Pacione as designer, but reverts to “by Aimee’ Marie Bejarano (Author), Daniela Frongia (Cover Design), & 1 more”
But the back cover, internals, ToC are still marred by the heavy paws of Pacione. To me his style is too layered and cluttered but I’m old school.
“Illustrator on novel is Daniela Frongia as she can be found at the following –”
Nickolaus’s grammar is up to its usual high standard, I see. Implies the sole reason for Daniela Frongia being engaged to illustrate was her use of that specific email address. Had she used a different email she’d have been shit out of luck!
Good God, if she can’t be bothered to look at his previous work, and worse, if she did, she gets what she pays for. I don’t feel much sympathy at this point.
Growing pains for newbie authors…I’m sorta with you on that. It sucks to be taken advantage of but if someone is serious about any venture, they should be doing some sort of research before leaping. I don’t mean to knock anyone for getting dinged. It’s just something we sometimes go through before we learn a hard lesson. It’s unfortunate that there are predatory types just waiting for a trusting innocent to take advantage of. I guess we live and learn.
Amazon’s “The Gateway” page “More About the Author Biography” is NOW Aimee’ Marie Bejarno’s biography and not Nickolaus Pacione’s biography.
Excellent. That beats the crap out of Nicky’s diatribe against his perceived rival that was there originally. I assume she’ll get her name fixed on the cover in due time.
I learned the accent “aigu” as “acute” opposed to the accent “grave” in the other direction, and memorized them by laying my right palm on my left breast reciting “A cute…” laying my left palm on my right breast “… grave.”
This is why I switched to German in 10th grade. All you have to keep up with is the umlaut, a relatively simple accent to use. If the a is long or the o or u sound like they’re spoken with marbles in the mouth, that’s because of an umlaut. 🙂 Or if it’s over the a in au, the ow sound changes to oy. And it can be spelled by placing an e after the affected vowel. Easy-peasy.
Eh, I took French classes in junior high. They got me through Paris and Marrakesh in the 70s, but by now, I’ve forgotten 90+% of it. German is easier, but probably because English is a germanic language. I can’t speak Spanish for shit, but I can read it. A handful of my books about growing orchids native to Central or South America are written in Spanish. I had to have a coworker confirm that bosque = forest, but other than that, I had no problem reading them.
I can read German, though I’m embarrassed to say I never learned how to speak it right. The consequences of teaching it to yourself. Now, in high school I took Latin, which has its merits and advantages. Once you learn Latin, you can *almost* figure out the majority of the Latin-based languages in print. But in retrospect, I wish I had taken Spanish. It would have been far more useful. One of these days…
You are german, aren’t you, Karen?
Do you have relatives that are living in Germany? If you’d visit them, I can guarantee that you would pick the language up in no time.
It’s good fun in germany, the ppl are nowhere near as bad as their reputation.
I’m mostly German tempered with a little English, which I like to joke keeps my crazy down to a manageable level. I would love to visit Germany one of these years, but most of our family records were lost when my grandparents immigrated, so I don’t know who specifically I’m related to, sadly, and I only have a vague idea of which region my people come from–Gera and Munchberg, apparently.
One interesting side-effect of having spent several years studying German occurred a year or two back. My oldest daughter and I attended Slapsticon, a celebration of silent comedies that was held at Indiana University, not far from my in-laws’ house. Someone had found a long lost short in the Netherlands, and it as shown the afternoon we were there. The intertitles (the cards inserted into silent films for short bits of dialogue or exposition) were still in Dutch. A hundred years ago, people tended to be less educated, so silent movie intertitles are usually on about a second grade reading level, at best. I discovered that second-grade Dutch is virtually mutually intelligible with comparable German. I had no trouble reading them, and was laughing louder than anyone else because the movie was funnier with them than without. I can usually parse out the basic gist of pretty simple written passages in most Germanic or Romance languages with some struggle, but I had no trouble whatsoever reading along with those intertitles.
Back in the ’90s, a coworker of mine was of Filipina decent, but was a Danish citizen. I remember reading something in Danish from the band Aqua on their website, and got the gist of it, but I remember asking her how to pronounce a couple of the words. She told me the nifty thing about Danish is that it doesn’t really matter how I pronounce the words, because any Dane would understand what I meant.
Around the same time, a guy from our office in Frankfut visited our office for a couple of days, and remarked about how refreshing it was that Americans didn’t nitpick over his pronunciation like the people in our London office did. All those years I lived in London, I thought retail clerks were just giving me grief for being an American. Nobody else ever did so; it was only the store clerks. In retrospect, it was probably because I’d call a sweater a sweater instead of a jumper, even though they knew perfectly well what I meant.
Let me know when you come to germany and I’ll pop over and show you the wild side of germany – I can guarantee you’ll have the time of your life and you will pick the language up in no time!
Yay! Party time with good old sonja…
And I don’t see how his new “Amazon’s Nickolaus Pacione Page” is going to attract new business.
Oh well, his Amazon page is back to NAP normal today. His photo now is a pose in front of a monument to Pres. John Tyler that should be a guide for cosplayers. (That floral bikini photo yest-erday was disturbing.)
Now Nicky’s doing more crowd-funding. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pacione/lock-n-key-project
Apparently Mr. Screaming-plagiarism-at-everybody has decided to do a “Lock & Key” anthology, even though Joe Hill has already had a long-standing, well-established comic series called Locke & Key for years. But, then, Danzig had a song called “Dirty Black Summer” and Nicky didn’t mind “borrowing” that, either.
Anyway, be sure to pledge at least $20 so you can get what everybody’s dying for — a phone call from Nicky! If you can’t afford it, let me know and for fifty cents I’ll call you and make a bunch of crazy honking noises. For an extra nickel I’ll throw in an inarticulate howl about Brian Keene stealing my SSN, just so it’ll feel like the real thing.
The screen-capture (smutted up around the edges to make it look all “gothic” or, maybe just to make it resemble Nicky’s actual computer screen with all the fried chicken grease on it) is especially funny. “I’m not scamming you, look, I have actual files in my computer!” It’s also kinda cute how he mentions stealing a whole lot more material from Project Gutenberg (which is like having a toddler give you a handful of gravel he picked up in the street and say “I brought you a pwesent!”) and then saying all the authors in the anthology who are still alive are psyched about it. No word from the dead ones. Too busy spinning in their graves to return calls, I guess….
Yes, and there’s this from the Kickstarter’s update page:
If I’m interpreting this Pacionese correctly, he bought a dress from Amazon to send to the woman who allegedly agreed to work with him, so that she can get in the proper mood to write a nuanced intro for the antho. Whether the dress cost $35, or he’s just rounding up his donations so far to the nearest $5 is unclear. This is at least the third dress he’s purchased for a woman he really doesn’t know. One of those was a special order hobble dress for $300.
There’s also some question as to whether the fool who pledged $30 is Nicky himself, seeding the Kickstarter with his dole money, or one of the live contributors to the antho.
Aside from that, I can’t make head or tails of his complaint that Tabetha claimed his original Kickstarter for Sinister Souls (in which he piggybacked his Lock ‘n Key) was really meant for her wedding fund, and not the anthologies. It’s irrelevant, though, since the goal wasn’t reached, and Tabbyscat’s alleged fiancé dumped her. Nothing she says is believable, anyway.
A $35 dress is probably quite a thing to see. Bet it’s got a picture of potatoes on it… Kind of makes me wonder what’s in Nicky’s closet.
I’m betting Nicky seeded himself, just so it’d look like somebody cares. He seems to be sock-puppeting more now. I noticed this Twitter account — https://twitter.com/dru6172 — which seems to exist only to fav and re-tweet Nicky’s stuff, and everything it follows is one of his pet obsessions. The only thing that makes me wonder if it could be some kind of parody deal is that it also follows Porky Pig fandom!
Nicky seeded himself? Quite likely. But if he ever learns how to use the washing machine he might get that stain out.
Nicky’s response to dirt and stains is just “walk it off!”
The video is pretty hilarious, too. It’s the usual who-knows-what-he’s-saying rambling, but at one point he takes us on a tour of his library… in almost complete darkness. So, that’s fun. I imagine he was holding a book, but I’m not really sure… you just kind of have to take his word for it that there are books there.
I was holding off on doing a new entry about this Kickstarter, to see how it evolved over the first week or so, but I no longer think it can wait. Therre are so many things wrong with it that it’s difficult to know where to start.
I agree with Naaman Brown upthread – the world does need to be warned about Nickolaus Pacione. I’m a frequent lurker here and just wanted to say hi and to give my compliments to you, Rusty, and your great blog – it’s been both informative and amusing over the years as I’ve read your posts about Nicky and others.
It was some years back when I first encountered Nickypoo – he took exception to some m/m stories I’d written and tried to harass me over AIM. I promptly rolled my eyes, thought “troll” and blocked him. Probably that was the best response as I soon learned more about him and discovered his truly horrific history of stalking, threatening etc. He’s truly a repulsive creature, a very poor excuse for a writer and a human being. The biggest shock I got back then was finding out that he’s actually a grown man – on paper at least. I’d thought he was some obsessive teenage fanboy with too much time on his hands. And he seems to have just got worse over time. Growing older obviously doesn’t mean growing up for this creep.
Have you seen this article below? About E.L. James and her fandom history, Nickerdoodles makes a disgusting spectacle of himself in the comments, trying to hijack threads and attempting to lure vulnerable young fandom writers in to contributing to his crappy anthologies. With all his usual bigoted caveats, of course.
http://www.crushable.com/2012/05/11/entertainment/el-james-snowqueens-icedragon-fifty-shades-of-grey-twilight-fandom-wank-860/
– Z.
Welcome. Yes, Nicky does have a habit of finding articles that are months, or even years old. The pool’s been drained, so to speak, yet he dives in head first, bloodies himself, and crawls back out to do it again. It never ceases to amaze me that he can remember the exact date two decades ago that something happened to him, but can’t figure out the date of publication for an article he just found. His mind seems to process the passage of time as if everything happened yesterday.
Thanks for the kind welcome and sorry for the late reply (have been in hospital but recovering now) and yes, Nicky seems to have mastered the art form of being totally irrelevant. Which is of course the only art form he could ever be capable of mastering,
He finally got someone to donate, a miracle! Mine is still doing better. 😛 https://www.gofundme.com/a65gpwws
What the….did he put her birthday on that front page with “- present.” Those overlapping fonts…oh my…that’s atrocious.
I hadn’t seen the hijacked author bio before. Classic Pacione. His obsession with Kealan’s birthday and his warped relation to himself is beyond creepy at this point.
But…. she was born 1978 which means she’s the same generation and she could have gone to school with him. That connection is important to him. If she had been born 1 month 14 days earlier, they could have been James Hetfield’s birthday presents, two years apart.
The current Look Inside! shows the “Aiden Jenson presents The Gateway” line is more presentable. I hope the Pacione paw prints will be removed over time.
He did clean up the title area, but he still has the entire paragraph at the bottom about him, what software he used to design it, and how find him on Facebook, before he gets around to mentioning the author and illustrator. Nobody cares what freeware he used to do the layout/design work, and his name should not come before the author’s.
That author’s name is still wrong on the front cover.
Just looking through a random selection of the books my wife and I accumulated over our lives, I get the impression that book designers usually have a one line credit or they are quietly promoted by word-of-mouth within the publishing industry. And that includes a book recently self-pub’d by a friend and former co-worker: one line credit for the cover artist. I found one book with one line crediting the cover artist and another line for a link to the artist. So far, nowhere have I seen what Pacione does.