The vanity publishing industry has taken a beating the last few years, due to bad publicity (Tate Publishing!) and the ease of self publishing. But there are still plenty of suckers out there so uninformed, lazy, or paranoid enough to make easy prey for the remaining vanity publishers.
What’s vanity publishing? In short, a vanity publisher charges authors to be published, in many ways: upfront fees going into thousands of dollars, ‘marketing packages’, or even author-buying requirements for a set number of books.
Unlike self-publishing where an author contracts out to separate professionals for editing, cover design, formatting, marketing, etc, vanity publishers claim to do it all for you (often at abysmal quality). Unlike book printers, which merely print and bind (or format, for e-books), vanity publishers often promise that they will sell the book, too. More and more of them are adding language to their front matter telling authors to be responsible for selling their own books…but the vanities cheerfully pay themselves a part of any sales off their website or other online platforms. Even after charging the author for publication!
If a publisher takes part of a book’s sales price, the publisher should be doing something to earn it. Most vanity publishers do not, but they are excellent at creating a cultlike us-against-them mentality in their authors, to keep those authors on the hook for paying for more books (and bringing in other authors). They’ll even brand themselves as self-publishers or ‘assisted self publishers’ just to further confuse authors.
Beware of writer’s magazines like Writer’s Digest, which in the last decades have become ridden with vanity publishing ads. Be cautious of popular magazines, late-night television, and other programming aimed at consumers (elderly, ultra-religious, unemployed or under-employed, blue collar workers) that might be receptive to vanity publishing, because the vanities are advertising there, too. ‘Have you written a book?’ ‘Do you want to be a published author?’ I’ve seen major vanity publishers show up at local and regional book festivals, to hook unwary authors.
I recently found another venue for vanity publishing advertising: local-interest neighborhood newspapers. It makes a sick kind of sense.
There on page 38 was a decent-sized ad for Dorrance. There’s a lot about Dorrance online, and they are not the only vanity publisher trolling for victims.
Local news is always hungry for feel-good stories about their citizens. Some examples just from my little suburban paper over the last few years: grieving widows and parents celebrating their lost loved ones with a published memoir, people recovering from dire illness or injury writing about their ordeal and triumph, would-be self-help gurus offering their tactics for success (the professional self-improvement folks almost always self-publish), senior citizens recounting family histories, people of faith giving testament to their deeply held beliefs, and teens writing fantasy and science fiction epics.
Many of these are vanity published, because the authors didn’t know enough to research commercial (where the publisher pays the author) or self publishing, but did a cursory search for publishing (or were recruited).
Many local-interest newspaper staffers don’t know better, either, and wouldn’t care if they did. They don’t have the time or the skill to research which feel-good story comes from a commercially-published author, a self-pub author, or a vanity-published victim.
I fired off a letter to the editor, and the next week the offending ad was gone. But I have no idea if that was due to my letter, or that the publisher’s ad run had simply ended.