Publishing is a hard and very competitive industry and, upon numerous rejections from traditional commercial publishing houses, wannabe authors who do not feel that they have the time and business acumen to self-publish may turn to another outfit to help them release their books. But beware of vanity presses; they are predatory and take advantage of the vulnerability of writers who are desperate to see their words in print.
Remember traditional publishers produce books; they are not service providers. They take on any financial risk associated with publishing a work. Vanity publishers upend this model; they don’t care and are not selective about the quality of a manuscript or its possible appeal to the market. That’s because their income stream derives from selling writers the dream of publication.
Here are five ways you can spot them.
Familiarise yourself with their contract and terms and conditions
You have to first recognise what constitutes vanity publishing in order to avoid their dubious practices. While a traditional publisher normally pays the writer for the right to publish their books by way of an advance (and, later, royalties if the book earns out its advance), authors would have to pay for editorial, production and marketing services should they approach a vanity press and these costs are not insubstantial, often in the thousands.
Do your research
Google is your friend here. Do a deep dive into the company’s name. Seek out any past customers to see the results of their investment into this press. It will not be surprising to hear of books that are riddled with formatting and grammatical/spelling errors because the company is trying to cut editorial costs by outsourcing to cheap and inexperienced labour.
Avoid any publisher that demands a large fee upfront
A vanity publisher’s business model necessitates payment from you before any actual production on your book can commence, so there is no incentive for them to do a good job of bringing your work to print. In other words, they make money by luring you in with claims of grandeur, but the subsequent book’s quality will most likely be inferior and the marketing negligible.
Watch out for hyperventilating promises
Be suspicious of any publisher who asserts that that they will make your book into a bestseller, make it available to all the major booksellers or are affiliated with Amazon. Publishing is an inexact science; no reputable company will ever promise large sales (unless you are already a household name like Trent Dalton or Liane Moriarty) and, moreover, vanity publishers wouldn’t have the sales connections to many of the large or independent bookstores to place your book there.
Read: 5 side hustles for writers
Beware of agents who seek to publish your work
Publishers and agents are daily inundated with unsolicited manuscripts; they have more than enough work with which to form their yearly schedules, so don’t fall for the ruse of someone who directly approaches you out of nowhere claiming to represent an imprint of a well-known mainstream publishing house and then offering to bring your manuscript to fruition for a substantial fee.
