I am no expert on publishing, but I think the subject of vanity press needs discussion and I invite people who actually know about this to offer their comments. Here are mine, which result from a bit of research, conversations with those that have gone this route, and help from a friend who used to work for a publishing house…

Vanity press publishers (or “self publishing”) are mostly expensive photocopying services. Many will charge huge upfront fees for the publishing of your book, or take a hefty percentage of any money from eventual sales (up to 96% in some cases) and yet many offer minimal help when it comes to editing, marketing and sales.

A student in my school recently went this route. He has had to fork out £500 initially and has promised them a further 50% of all future sales of his book. I have had a look at it – it is littered with spelling and grammatical errors, the story is trite, the characters are dull, the action is boring. The whole thing stinks of ego and conceit. A real publisher would not have looked twice at it, or even made it past the first page.

Increasingly I am reading people’s notes above their items and seeing words like: “I have found a publisher and this is the final polish stage before I send it off” and yet what follows is RUBBISH!!!

You want to get published? Do it properly and get an agent. If you manage to find an agent, well done, now maybe you’ll find a publisher. If you are lucky enough to have a publisher interested in your work, you might be able to sell a decent number of books. To go any other route is a WASTE OF MONEY and serves only to massage your ego and clutter up bargain bins of sub-standard book shops.

The agent/publisher route is hard – of that there is no doubt – and most aspiring writers will fail, but that is the point! Most people are not MEANT to be writers because they simply are not talented enough. Harsh but true. Do you find everyone who thinks they can splash some paint on a canvas and call it art getting their own shows at a gallery because they pay to do so? No. To do so would weaken the integrity of real art. Why then are “publishers” encouraging the practice in writing? Because they are NOT PUBLISHERS. They are only after your money. Writing is an art, and these companies are not serving artistic purposes.

Now it may be that I am one of those people that won’t get published. When I have finished my book (I’m only 25,000 words in) I will go back over it and then give it to friends and family to read. After a first edit I’ll probably publish a bit on Urbis to get some feedback (but not until it is finished dammit! No matter how tempting). I’ll then spend some more time reworking it. When I am TOTALLY happy with it, I’m going to do a 100 copies of the first few chapters, attach a synopsis and a covering letter, and send it to every literary agent in the UK specialising in my genre. If no one gets back to me, I’ll rewrite it and try again. If that fails, I’ll write something new and have a go with that. If in 20 years I haven’t succeeded I might think about giving up. One thing I won’t be doing is throwing in the towel earlier than that, or trying to cut corners by self-publishing.

So from now on, if you are considering self publishing, just ask yourself why. Is it because you can’t be bothered to go the real route? Well that’s lazy and stupid of you then, since if you think your work is good enough to publish, you can get a real publisher to do it, and guess what? They pay YOU to publish! If you ignore my advice and go for it anyway, that’s up to you, but please be truthful in your notes above your items in future. Don’t say “I’ve found a publisher”, say “I am paying a company to publish my book” since that is what you are doing.

Respect, brother. I agree wholeheartedly. Your rant fired my pistons. Self-publishers are indeed the vainglorious prats of the literary world and we should smite them with all our earthly wrath.

Get back into the trenches with the rest of us, you silly ninnies.

Self-publishing isn’t lazy. Self-publishing is a business that is anything but lazy. You have to everything yourSELF.

If you decide to self-publish, you MUST

1. Have your text professionally edited.
2. Have the cover designed.
3. Do all the administrative work: ISBN, copyright, etc.
4. Get quotes from lots of printers to find the cheapest and best one.
5. Get a distribution deal with a reputable company that’s not going to go bankrupt in the next couple of days.
6. Get pre-street date copies out to reviewers so that you can use their reviews in your marketing material.
7. Prepare your marketing material.
8. Go to the bookstores where your distributor has sent your books and ask to do book signings.
9. Think. Think. Think. How can you market this book? Actually, this should have been no. 1.

I can’t really see how anyone could call this process LAZY. Just 60 years ago, some of our most beloved writers self-published.

Certainly, self-publishing may not be the best route for a lot of writers because they simply don’t have the business sense to do all of this themselves. And certainly, we all wish a publisher would do all of this work for us. The reality is that publishers expect writers to do much of their own marketing. If you sign with a small publisher, the budget they allocate to your project might be . . . uh . . . nothing. They print 500 books and see what happens. They do no promotion except to put your postage-stamp-sized book cover on their website. What happens? Nothing . . . unless you do the work. Then, you get about 10% of the sales.

If you had self-published and done all the work yourself, you might have made a 30% profit.

That said, your point is well taken. Self-publishing does not have the reputation that publishing the traditional way has. It would be better to say how many books you’ve sold. Period. Eighty percent of books published these days fail. Fail. This means that publishers – the publishers we regularly get refusals from – are not publishing what people want to read. Eighty percent. And then the twenty percent that ARE successful are crap like The Devil Wears Prada and The DaVinci Code. How embarrassing for our world. It is no wonder that there is a self-publishing revolution going on today. We are drowning in bad fiction – except of course for Jincy Willett. I want to have your children, Jincy.

Bravis and DC are looking at two different aspects of self publishing.

Bravis is looking at those con artist companies, the “we can make money out of publishing without selling a single book” brigade. They accept drafts, for a hefty fee, then sell the prints to the author. Bookshops etc steer totally clear of them.

DC is looking at those that are genuinely ‘self published’, fully taking on the role of a publisher with a single client – themselves.

Here’s a nice little true story.

A man in Auckland wrote books. He then printed them using his computer and an ink jet printer.
He then spent everyday sat in the high street with his printed work piled beside him, using the time to continue writing in his notebook (paper not computer)

He sold copies this way for quite some time. Word spread, a ‘genuine’ publisher approached him (in the street).
His story was in the newspapers, his properly published book sold extremely well.
Yet, he still continued to sit in the high street writing and selling his home printed work.
It had become a way of life for him.

Avedis-

I’m printing this up and will tape it on my workstation. (In quotation marks of course.)

Has anyone used CreateSpace – it’s an affiliate of Amazon, and prints on demand. Claims no set-up fees – you just upload your file including cover, and follow the instructions. It’s a while since I investigated it, but if people are serious about self-publishing, then surely this is one of the better options?

Why self-publish at all? I mean, I look at it as a version of feeding your own ego and the ability to claim that you’ve been published. I’m sure there aren’t any ‘set-up’ fees, but there’s fees on the back-end. Someone has to pay for your book being put into binding. You try and send that out to a publishing house (not self-publishing) and you’ll get laughed right out of the office.

My humble opinion, if you want to feed your ego and say that you’ve been published, then go with the self-publishing route. I understand that big writers have done it before. I’m just trying to say that if you get self-published, the chances of you getting a book into a publishing house (especially the one you just published) is about nil to none. The story that Avedis shared is heart-warming and gives inspiration. That’s the REAL version of self-publishing and the only way that I agree with.

Just my $0.02.

While clearly letting a professional do stuff is the best for most – and there is plenty of real garbage coming off the vanity presses, there are some real gems which get left behind by the big names, and self publishing is one of the only ways we’re ever likely to see them in print. So there certainly is a place for Self Publishing.

As I understand it (after a very cursory look), Createspace is a massive computerised database which is capable of selecting and printing one copy of a book at a time to fulfill an order. It’s able to maintain economies of scale because it’s doing this with 10’s of 1,000’s of books a day. Each copy is expensive (from memory around $9.00 for a 250pp paperback) so the margins are small. But if nothing else it’s a good way to test the water until a real publisher takes a look.

That’s not true, tnd. One of the biggest selling series of novels in Europe right now was started as a self-published novel: “A Year in the Merde” Stephen Crane?? The author self-published this book, had a few hundred copies printed.

I read the first book, didn’t find it particularly interesting. It sold millions after it was picked up by a big publisher.

Self-publishing… I used to view it as the last act of desperate wealthy writers, hoping vainly to publish their unedited guffsticks.

I still kinda do, but DC is right, alas. He has the wisdom of Solomon and the hips of Jacob. Look at them swing in the moonlight.

DC is correct. Most writers and poets, even up until the 1970s, self-published to get in to the business before awards and recognition led to the larger publishing houses. The large, industrial publishing house is a creature of the 1950s. The hey-day of the large, industrial publishing house was the 1970s.

With that said, I have no interest in doing all THAT work to get my first novel published. I’m too lazy and it’s not my expertise. While I am working on that novel (and two other manuscripts) I am also building up my name with smaller works (short stories, poetry, essays, etc.) so that I have a decent publication history when I start approaching agents. I have also been developing a network of friends and acquaintances of published writers and editors, and leaders of the arts community. Who you know goes a long way in the world.

This doesn’t make the vanity presses, like PA, less evil. It opens the door to anybody with a few bucks in their pocket to get a book printed. A few of those works might be very good. The vast majority will be very, very bad. Agents merely screen work according to industry standards, so those works are “more likely” to be good. There are no guarantees of success – ever gone through the discount bin at your local bookstore?

Know your strengths and weaknesses. I know mine. Work them toward your goal, whatever that might be.