All Entries Tagged With: "vanity press"

ISBW Video #10 – Vanity Presses and NaNoWriMo

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NaNoWriMo is over! Did you win? I sure as heck didn’t. I grant you 3 days off. By Thursday I want you writing again. I explain why I’m a NaNo failure (again) and what I think of the Harlequin Horizons thing. Check my most recent blogpost for links.

Promo: Grant’s Advent Calendar

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On Vanity Presses and Money Flow

The whole Harlequin Horizons kerfuffle has been rampaging around the blogosphere for the past two weeks. I haven’t said anything about it because I haven’t had anything new to say in regards to it that others haven’t said better. Here’s a list from Making Light of write-ups from the pro organizations. Read these links and then come back.

Now, I’ve said before I don’t look down on self-publishing as long as you know what you’re getting into. That no one will market your book. That you won’t be in book stores. And that it is extremely unlikely you will be a star. You’ll get a book with your name on the cover and your story inside. Whether anyone buys, reads, and enjoys it is up to your marketing and writing abilities.

But vanity publishing is a nastier subject.** Like I said, many people have written about this, and I won’t go over other arguments. I’ve been thinking about how to approach this and I finally came up with what’s bugging me about vanity publishers.

Your goal is to write books and get them into people’s hands. You want people to buy your books. A publisher puts out books. They work hard to acquire, edit, market, and distribute the books. (Yes, many authors think that the publishers don’t market enough, but you gotta admit they do more for your book than PoDs and vanity presses do.) The key – KEY – thing here is that both authors and publishers expect people to buy the books. They are on the same side. It’s author and publisher on one side, readers on the other. Not against each other, but one side gives money, the other accepts.

(Yeah. I suck at ASCII. And this theme apparently ignores “border=0.”) So when you look at vanity publishers, they have a different business plan.

See the difference?

A lot of people ask how they can tell if a publisher is vanity or legit. I think the website litmus test is quite good: the group they point their message at is who gives them their largest revenue stream. Legitimate publishers point their websites toward readers. Vanity presses point their websites toward authors.

This makes sense. The website is a big marketing tool, and you use it to make money. The websites that say they are THERE TO HELP YOU COMPLETE YOUR DREAM are really saying YOU WILL GIVE US MONEY. When they say LOOK AT OUR AWESOME BOOKS, they are saying READERS WILL GIVE US MONEY AND THEN WE’LL GIVE SOME TO YOU.

Yog’s Law is a basic, basic premise that you should keep in mind whenever you’re getting ready to pull out that checkbook or credit card. Learn it. When you say you want to be a writer, are you saying that you want to publish a book, or make money publishing a book? There’s a difference.

1. ** Print on Demand publishing is usually free to the author. Vanity publishing is when the author puts money up front to buy their books.
2. *** Yog’s Law: money should flow toward the author. James D. MacDonald