James Douglas Ignatius Macdonald (born 1954) is an American author and critic who lives in New Hampshire.

It is often quoted by professional authors such as John Scalzi[3] and Teresa Nielsen Hayden[4] when giving advice on finding an agent and getting published.

Macdonald organized a group of professional authors to test whether that company was actually reading any submissions for clarity and realism before accepting them.

One day after Macdonald issued a press release announcing that PublishAmerica had accepted a manuscript that was created to be as bad as possible, the company withdrew the offer to publish it.

[1] Written with Debra Doyle, Mageworlds is a space opera novel series originally published in the 1990s and re-issued as e-books in 2012.