Vanity publishing is the practice of charging authors a fee to have their books published. It's a form of self-publishing that lacks the peer review process and quality control found in traditional publishing.
Often, these companies offer low-quality production, and fail to offer meaningful distribution or marketing. They also make it hard for authors to recoup their investment.
What is Vanity Publishing?
Vanity publishing is a form of book publishing in which the author pays an excessive fee to have their book published. This fee typically covers all the costs associated with author services like editing, cover design, and marketing. This type of publisher is also likely to charge a high percentage of sales revenue, making it difficult for authors to recover their costs.
While it isn't always possible to avoid vanity publishers entirely, there are a few ways you can ensure that you don't end up with a scammy publisher. First of all, make sure to do your research and find out as much as you can about the company.
Second, don't trust any promises made by the company without writing them down yourself. You can also do a simple Google search to see what people have said about the publisher in question.
Third, don't sign a contract with a vanity publisher unless you receive legal advice from an attorney. This is important because some vanity publishers will try to get you to sign away your rights indefinitely or require that you give up foreign rights and adaptation rights with very little or no royalties.
Fourth, check whether or not the vanity publisher is legally registered. If they aren't, you may be in trouble down the line.
Finally, make sure that the publisher has a track record of success and that they offer meaningful distribution and marketing. This is important because if you have a poor-quality book, it will be hard for you to sell copies of it and recoup your costs.
Unlike traditional publishers, who take financial risks by investing in books and then recouping those investments via book sales, vanity presses are not motivated to provide quality service and produce a good book. As a result, they will often cut costs to meet their budget and publish poorly-written or even unreadable books.
In addition to this, many vanity publishers will not be able to help you market your book and will have a hard time gaining visibility in the literary world. They will also typically charge a very high price for their services, which means that they will be unlikely to share any details about how the money is spent with you.
Vanity Publishing Scams
There are a number of vanity publishing scams that aspiring authors should be on the lookout for. These companies are out to take advantage of unsuspecting writers by charging them money upfront in order to carry out a range of publishing services. These scams are often difficult to spot, as they often masquerade as legitimate publishers and are not easy to distinguish from reputable self-publishers.
One of the biggest vanity publishing scams is a company that promises to get your book into bookstores like Barnes and Noble. In reality, this is impossible to achieve unless you are well-established and have already been in the publishing industry for a while. Moreover, these publishers often don't even bother to sell the books to bookstores, so you may end up getting nothing from them in return.
Another common vanity publishing scam is a publisher who claims that they have the backing of major publishing houses, such as Simon and Schuster. They will often provide a sample sales projection, promising to sell a certain number of copies of your book. However, these projections are usually exaggerated and do not reflect reality.
Some trad-adjacent vanities also promise to gain the attention of major imprints by submitting your book to their editors. For example, a vanity press called Archway Publishing tells authors that "Select titles published by Archway are reviewed by a board made up of Simon & Schuster editors for possible acquisition by Simon & Schuster."
These supposedly reputable publishers are incompetent, do not have a reputation for quality, and are often in business for themselves. Reputable literary agents do not work with vanity publishers.
Many of these companies will not edit your manuscript. This is because they do not care about the quality of your book and are only interested in making money from it. Despite this, they often ask you to pay for editing and design as part of their fees.
Vanity presses have no incentive to make high-quality edits or proofread your book, as they do not profit from the books they publish. Therefore, they do not need to make these efforts.
Vanity Publishing Costs
The publishing costs involved with vanity publishing are quite staggering. They can be thousands of dollars for just the basic services that legitimate publishers provide free. These include editing, cover design, typesetting and even distribution to book shops.
In addition, a lot of them also ask authors to pay for promotional services like reviews, corrections and enhanced distribution. Often, these requests aren’t just one off payments: they can come back again and again until authors have nothing left to pay for them!
Luckily, there are other ways to go about self-publishing that don’t involve these expensive costs. There are freelancers and a-la-cart service providers who can help you get your book into print for a fraction of the cost that a vanity publisher will charge.
Reputable self-publishing companies will give you a comprehensive list of all the services that they offer, and how much each service will cost. This allows you to make an informed decision about whether it’s right for you, and what services you actually need.
Be sure to look over the contract before signing it. Vanity publishing contracts usually aren’t negotiable, so you should make sure that they contain all the terms and clauses you need to know. Having someone who is experienced in publishing law take a look at it can be helpful.
Another thing to look for is a double standard. Some vanity publishers claim to accept every manuscript that comes in, but then say that you have to pay for your book upfront in order to be published with them. Hybrid publishers, on the other hand, will accept only manuscripts that meet certain criteria and are selected for publication.
In short, the difference between vanity and hybrid publishers is that vanity presses publish anything they can get their hands on while hybrid publishers only accept manuscripts that they think will sell well. In addition, hybrid publishers typically have higher royalty rates than traditional publishers do, and they have to manage the entire distribution process for their authors.
So, if you’re planning to self-publish, be careful to choose only reputable self-publishing services and a good legal attorney who understands publishing contracts.
Vanity Publishing Services
Vanity publishing services offer authors a number of shoddy and unprofessional options for getting their books published. Unlike traditional publishers, they don’t pay an advance on royalties or provide the author with any marketing support; rather, they charge authors for editorial and production services, and then pocket most of the money from sales.
Many vanities charge a steep fee for their services, with little to no transparency about how much they actually cost. This makes them easy targets for deceptive advertising. Moreover, since most of the money is given to the publisher instead of the author, it means that they have little incentive to spend on quality editing, design, and marketing.
The most common vanity publishing scams involve fraudulent marketing, bogus editing and design, and unreasonably high prices for production and distribution. The resulting books are often of low-quality and lacking in reader appeal.
Another common fraud is the claim that an author only pays part of the costs and the publisher fronts the rest, which is a lie. This is because most vanity publishers are in the business of making a profit, not selling books to the public; their profits come from fees, and not book sales to the public.
In other instances, the vanity publishing service may claim that they are offering a non-fee contract alongside their fee-based contracts, but this is a lie as well. The publisher may be using pay-to-play contracts as a way to cut costs; it is unlikely that they would set up a traditional publishing company, so they wouldn’t be in a position to provide quality services to authors who didn’t want to pay their fees.
It is a scam that writers should be very wary of, because it can end in them losing their hard-earned money. Fortunately, there are ways to avoid falling for vanity publishing scams.
One option is to seek out a small press that offers an author a legitimate writing credit. They may not have the distribution clout of traditional publishing houses, but they can offer personal attention and can publish excellent-quality books. They also may not require an advance on royalties and don’t demand that the author submit their manuscript to them, so they can be a good choice for writers who aren’t interested in DIY self-publishing or who have failed to find agents.