Well, according to Melrose Books it’s a shared partnership between publisher and author. If we feel that a manuscript has sufficient merit and can be promoted successfully we will make an offer of publication. The author commissions us to publish their book by bearing a cost towards the publishing process. That sounds like vanity publishing…
Category Archives: vanity publishing
YouWriteOn Dissolved?
Regular readers of this blog might remember that in September 2008 I blogged about YouWriteOn’s offer to publish the first 5,000 writers who submitted their work, and that I wrote a few more blog posts about YouWriteOn in the subsequent months. YouWriteOn’s publishing scheme was ill-conceived and badly organised: few books were actually published by…
Inside PublishAmerica
I don’t often blog about PublishAmerica, as the forums on AbsoluteWrite do an excellent job of informing writers of the truth behind this dubious company. But today, I shall make an exception. A couple of days ago a new member arrived at AbsoluteWrite who claimed to work for PublishAmerica. I’ve read threads like that before…
Brit Writers’ Awards
Earlier this year I began to see questions about the Brit Writers’ Award competitions cropping up on writers’ message boards. Writers were being notified left, right and centre that they had made it through to the various shortlists; very few writers who entered ended up being told that their work hadn’t made it that far;…
Reverse Vanity Publishing
You used to know right where you were with vanity publishers. They charged an extortionate amount to print a few copies of your unedited book and left you to do all the selling. That upfront charge was the way to spot them: no reputable publisher charges its authors anything. Eventually, most writers got wise to…
Mainstream Publishing Is Not Scared of Self-Publishing
(Not even when it jumps out from behind the literary sofa and shouts BOO!) A couple of weeks ago on the social whirl that is Twitter, someone suggested to me that the reason that commercial publishers are so dismissive of self- and vanity-publishers is that they are either scared of them, or in denial over…
Mainstream, Vanity And Self-Publishing: What Are The Differences?
There are three different ways writers can get published: but I’d only recommend two of them. Guess which ones. Mainstream or commercial publishing, which pays advances and royalties, relies on editorial selection to find the best or most appropriate books for the market, and puts a considerable amount of professional expertise into producing the best…
When Argument Is Futile
For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter, my user-name there is @hprw and I use this tiny picture of a peacock as my avatar. Remember the picture: it will be important later. A few days ago I encountered a self-published writer on Twitter who had some rather strange views about how self-publishing…
The Truth About The 6 Year Old Boy With The 23 Book Deal
Last Friday, Twitter was awash with links to this story in the Mirror, which described how six-year-old Leo Hunter had landed an amazing twenty-three book deal. I was immediately suspicious, as was Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware, Lynn Price of Behler Publications, and many other writers and bloggers. No one gets twenty-three book deals, not…
The Writing Business: Part III
This is the final part of the talk I gave at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. You can read part I here, and part II here. The Writing Business 44) So, once you’re sure your writing is as good as it can be, you have to work out where to submit it. How can…
The Writing Business: Part II
This is part two of the talk I gave at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this week. You can read the first part here, and the final part will appear tomorrow. The Writing Business 25) How hard is it to get an agent? Let’s look at some statistics. 26) At her talk at the Romantic…
The Writing Business: Part I
Two days ago I spoke at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (get me!), on the subject of The Writing Business. I’d never done anything like this before, so I was very lucky to share the stage with Keith Charters of Strident Publishing and to have the event chaired by the writer Eric Swanepoel, who was…
Jeremy Vine on Self Publishing
Last Friday Jeremy Vine discussed self-publishing on his BBC Radio 2 midday show (you can listen to that show here for a further four days: it begins about half-way through the recording). His studio guest was Kim Cross, co-founder and managing director of Grosvenor House Publishing (which according to the definition is a vanity publisher…
How To Make Money Out Of Writers
Run a writing competition, and attract as many entries as you can: the internet makes it easy to find writers’ groups and message boards where you can advertise your competitions for free. You don’t even have to charge an entry fee: just get as many entries in, as quickly as you can. You don’t need…
Fee-Charging Literary Agents: What’s So Bad?
Good literary agents earn their living through commissions on the sales that they make to legitimate publishers, while less scrupulous agents earn by charging fees to the writers that they “represent”. So, if an agency doesn’t charge its writers up-front fees, you’d expect them to be legitimate. Sadly that’s not always the case: the notorious…
Will I Get Published Any Other Way?
A few weeks ago I corresponded with a frustrated writer who was considering vanity publication. When I advised her against it she replied with words to this effect: “I can see why you don’t like it. But I can’t get my book published any other way. There are millions of writers out there, and only…
Persistence Or Desperation?
In the relatively short life of this blog (I began blogging in June 2008), I’ve told just three people that they are not welcome here. One was a writer who argued with me about YouWriteOn’s vanity-publishing scheme. I didn’t object to his arguing: we are all entitled to express our own opinions. But I did…
Harlequin Horizons: An Update
Harlequin’s venture into “self-publishing” (I use the inverted commas because although that’s what they’re calling it it’s not self-publishing, it’s vanity publishing) has gathered a huge amount of criticism since I blogged about it earlier this week. Jackie Kessler has written a very good overview of the situation here (my thanks to Janet Reid for…
Harlequin Horizons: Looking To The Future, Or Exploiting The Naive?
The news that Harlequin has teamed up with Author Solutions (owner of Author House, and several other pay-to-publish services) to create a new “self publishing” imprint called Harlequin Horizons is perhaps not surprising. A few weeks ago, Thomas Nelson transformed its existing West Bow Press imprint into a similar “self publishing” scheme alongside Author Solutions;…