External links
- Writer Beware on Vanity Presses
- Vanity Publishing Information Advice and Warning
- Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab
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A vanity press or vanity publisher, sometimes also subsidy publisher, [1] is a book printer that is paid by authors to self-publish their books. [2] A vanity press charges fees in advance and does not contribute to the development of the book. [3] It has been described as a scam, [2] though, as the book does get printed, it does not necessarily rise to the level of fraud. [4] The term vanity press is derogatory, so it is not used by the printers. [2] Some self-publishing businesses prefer to market themselves as an independent press, and some authors who are self-publishing through CreateSpace and Amazon Kindle prefer to market themselves as indie authors instead of as self-publishing authors. [3]
It is not to be confused with hybrid publishing, where the publisher and author collaborate and share costs and risks, or with assisted self-publishing, where the authors, sometimes styling themselves as authorpreneurs, [5] pay various contractors and publishing services to assist them with self-publishing their own book, and retain all rights.
Mainstream publishers never charge authors to publish their books; the publisher bears all the risks of publication and pays all the costs. Because of that financial risk, mainstream publishers are extremely selective in what they will publish, and reject most manuscripts submitted to them. The high level of rejection is why some authors publish with vanity presses. James D. Macdonald says, "Money should always flow towards the author", [6] a concept sometimes called Yog's Law.
Mainstream publishers also provide services. Ordinary author services, such as editing, book cover design, and publicity, are provided by mainstream publishers for free, whereas a vanity press charges fees for these services. [3]
Hybrid publishing is the source of debate in the publishing industry, with some viewing hybrid publishers as vanity presses in disguise. [7] However, a true hybrid publisher is selective in what they publish and will share the costs (and therefore the risks) with the author, whereas with a vanity press, the author pays the full cost of production and therefore carries all the risk. The vanity press has absolutely no interest in whether the book is saleable or suitable for publication. [8]
Given the bad reputation of vanity publishing, many vanity presses brand themselves as hybrids, leading to exploitation of writers. The Society of Authors (SoA) and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) have called for reform of the hybrid/paid-for publishing sector. Trade unions representing 14,800 authors jointly published a report [9] to expose widespread bad practices among companies that charge writers to publish their work while taking away their rights.
It is often stated that many famous authors, such as Mark Twain and Jane Austen, have used vanity publishers. This is incorrect and confuses self-publishing with vanity publishing. [10]
In a variant of Yog's law for self-publishing, author John Scalzi has proposed an alternate definition to distinguish self-publishing from vanity publishing: "While in the process of self-publishing, money and rights are controlled by the writer." [11]
Self-publishing is distinguished from vanity publishing by the writer maintaining control of copyright as well as the editorial and publishing process, including marketing and distribution.
Vanity presses often engage in deceptive practices or offer costly, poor-quality services with limited recourse available to the writer. In the US, these practices have been cited by the Better Business Bureau as unfavorable reports by consumers. [12]
One common scam is when a vanity press pretends to operate a traditional publishing arm, where the publishing house bears the full cost. However, when an author submits his work, he is told it does not quite meet the standards required for traditional publishing, but that the company will still publish it if the author pays for something—engaging their professional editor, committing to buying a large number of copies of the book, or another similar excuse. In reality, the exorbitant fee charged for these services will fully cover the vanity publisher's costs for producing the book. [13] Such a scam is a plot point in Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum .
The vanity press model exists for other media such as videos, music and photography. A notable example is ARK Music Factory, which, for a fee, produced and released Rebecca Black's 2011 viral video "Friday". [14]
Vanity academic journals also exist, often called predatory journals, which publish with little or no editorial oversight, although they may claim to be peer reviewed. One such predatory journal, the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology , accepted for publication a paper called Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List [15] consisting of the sentence "Get me off your fucking mailing list." repeated many times. [16]
Vanity photography magazines often have little or no physical circulation, relying instead on the submitting photographers buying the magazine after publication. [17] Some also charge a submission fee. Magazines such as Lucy's, Jute, and Pump – all managed by parent publisher Kavyar – often accept photograph submissions for free, or for a minimal fee to be featured on a magazine cover. [18]
The term vanity press appeared in mainstream U.S. publications as early as 1941. [19] In that year, C. M. Flumiani was sentenced to 18 months in a US prison for mail fraud, arising from his scheme that promised book promotion (a line in a catalog), expert editing (they accepted all books), and acting as agent bringing books to his own publishing houses. [20]
By 1956, the three leading American vanity presses (Vantage Press, Exposition Press, and Pageant Press) were each publishing more than 100 titles per year. [20]
Ernest Vincent Wright, author of the 1939 novel Gadsby , written entirely in lipogram, was unable to find a publisher for his work and ultimately chose to publish it through a vanity press.
Is a vanity press a scam? Kind of. But it is not necessarily fraud. Clients generally get what they pay for, but what you are paying for is not much despite how it is packaged. You pay to produce copies of your book and share any profits with the printer.
Vanity publishing is like T-ball: Everyone gets a chance at bat, gets a hit, and takes home a trophy. But don't expect anyone other than your mom to applaud.
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In legal discourse, an author is the creator of an original work that has been published, whether that work is in written, graphic, or recorded medium. The creation of such a work is an act of authorship. Thus, a sculptor, painter, or composer, is an author of their respective sculptures, paintings, or compositions, even though in common parlance, an author is often thought of as the writer of a book, article, play, or other written work. In the case of a work for hire, the employer or commissioning party is considered the author of the work, even if they did not write or otherwise create the work, but merely instructed another individual to do so.
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software, and other content available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, comic books, newspapers, and magazines. With the advent of digital information systems, the scope has expanded to include digital publishing such as e-books, digital magazines, websites, social media, music, and video game publishing.
Print on demand (POD) is a printing technology and business process in which book copies are not printed until the company receives an order, allowing prints in single or small quantities. While other industries established the build-to-order business model, POD could only develop after the beginning of digital printing because it was not economical to print single copies using traditional printing technologies such as letterpress and offset printing.
A ghostwriter is a person hired to write literary or journalistic works, speeches, or other texts that are putatively credited to another person as the author. Celebrities, executives, participants in timely news stories, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, memoirs, magazine articles, or other written material.
A small press is a publisher with annual sales below a certain level or below a certain number of titles published. The terms "indie publisher" and "independent press" and others are sometimes used interchangeably. However, when a distinction is drawn, there are about 100,000 small presses and about one million independent presses.
America Star Books, formerly PublishAmerica, is a Maryland-based print-on-demand book publisher founded in 1999 by Lawrence Alvin "Larry" Clopper III and Willem Meiners. Some writers and authors' advocates have accused the company of being a vanity press while representing itself as a "traditional publisher". It changed its name in 2014, and since 2017 it has stopped accepting new authors.
An author mill is a publisher that relies on producing large numbers of small-run books by different authors, as opposed to a smaller number of works published in larger numbers. The term was coined by Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware, as a parallel formation from diploma mill, an unaccredited college or university that offers degrees without regard to academic achievement, and puppy mill, a breeding operation that produces large numbers of puppies for sale with little regard for breed purity, puppy placement, health, or socialization.
A literary agent is an agent who represents writers and their written works to publishers, theatrical producers, film producers, and film studios, and assists in sale and deal negotiation. Literary agents most often represent novelists, screenwriters, and non-fiction writers.
Midwest Book Review, established in 1976, produces nine book-review publications per month.
Author Solutions is the parent company of a number of vanity presses, including AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, Xlibris, Palibrio, and Booktango. The company is headquartered in Bloomington, Indiana, and has been owned by Najafi Companies since 2015.
Self-publishing is the publication of media by its author at their own cost, without the involvement of a publisher. The term usually refers to written media, such as books and magazines, either as an ebook or as a physical copy using print on demand technology. It may also apply to albums, pamphlets, brochures, games, video content, artwork, and zines. Web fiction is also a major medium for self-publishing.
Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is a predatory academic publisher of open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies that are considered to be of questionable quality. As of December 2014, it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine.
OMICS Publishing Group is a predatory publisher of open access academic journals. It started publishing its first journal in 2008. By 2015, it claimed over 700 journals, although about half of them were defunct. Its subsidiaries and brands include Allied Academies, Conference Series LLC LTD, EuroSciCon LTD, Hilaris Publishing, iMedPub LTD, International Online Medical Council (IOMC), Longdom Publishing SL, Meetings International, Prime Scholars, Pulsus Group, Research & Reviews, SciTechnol, Trade Science Inc, Life Science Events, Walsh Medical Media, and IT Medical Team.
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model, where the journal or publisher prioritizes self-interest at the expense of scholarship. It is characterized by misleading information, deviates from the standard peer-review process, is highly non-transparent, and often utilizes aggressive solicitation practices.
A vanity award is an award in which the recipient purchases the award and/or marketing services to give the false appearance of a legitimate honor. Pitches for Who's Who-type publications, biographies or nominations for awards or special memberships can have a catch to them in which the honoree is required to pay for recognition.
An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.
The International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology (IJACT) is a publication which has been described as a predatory open access journal—a publication which has some of the surface attributes of a benign open access journal but is actually an exploitative and deceptive corruption of that model, operating as a disreputable vanity press with little scholarly value.
Austin Macauley Publishers Limited is a British publishing company, with offices in London, New York and Sharjah. The company was founded in 2006 and publishes fiction and non-fiction books. It publishes new and established authors. The company publishes books in English and Arabic languages.
A hybrid press is a publishing house which can be broadly defined by its source of revenue. The revenue source of a traditional publisher is through the sale of books that they publish, while the revenue of hybrid publishers comes from both book sales and fees charged to the author for the execution of their publishing services.
