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 that and many vanity publishers had to change their business model in order to continue trading.
Their first change was to call their business model subsidy publishing, assisted publishing, cooperative publishing, joint-venture publishing… you get the picture. Rebranding. It worked, to some extent, until along came James MacDonald with Yog’s Law, which states simply that “money flows towards the writer”. And not away from the writer, in the form of cheques to “subsidy” (or any other euphemism you care to use) publishers.
Then came PublishAmerica with (I’ll grudgingly admit) a brilliant business model. Instead of charging money up-front, PublishAmerica relieves writers of their cash after their books have been printed by getting them to bulk-buy copies of their own over-priced books, with hiked-up shipping costs included as part of the bargain. It is a brilliant idea. By providing a token advance of one dollar, PublishAmerica masquerades as a mainstream publisher but the end result is still the same: writers pay over the odds for books of limited value, which they then often struggle to sell.
Some vanity publishers operate as hybrids of these two forms, charging a smaller upfront fee while also encouraging their writers to buy stacks of books for resale.
Many vanity presses insist that they are breaking the mould of “traditional” publishing; that publishing is changing, and new business models are required, particularly in periods of great technological advances or economic uncertainty. Print on demand is often considered essential for these new business models which has an awful lot to do with the fact that it’s near-enough to free for the publishers to use, so they avoid incurring those high up-front costs that an offset litho run involves. I’ve even read some publishers insist that they’re protecting the environment by only using print on demand technology to print their books and while I’ve not researched the full implications of that claim I’m cynical enough to doubt that it is their primary motivation for relying on POD the way that they do.
It doesn’t matter what publishers call their business models. If the authors end up paying the publishers money—whether at the front-end of publication in the form of editing costs, typesetting fees, subsidised print runs or ISBN purchases, or at the back end of publication by buying books by the boxful in order to resell them—then they are dealing with a vanity press. No matter how much that presses concerned insist that they are not.
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Absolutely – the difference from self-publishing being that in the latter the writer pays the editor; Nielsen/Bowker; designer directly.
Have you talked about academic presses? These almost all operate a subsidy model – and it’s not at all the case that the university simply pays an academic’s fee. One of the things my academics (in the day job – I don’t personally have cash to dole out) come to me for is a grant to help them publish their book, and often the money just isn’t there.
Of course, the reason why academic presses run a subsidy model – especially for monograph series – is the same reason a fiction publisher wouldn’t take on all kinds of difficult to place material – the market is too small.
What differentiates the academic model from the vanity model (interesting that academic presses are moving to a POD model, but costs are still needed for editing and indexing etc [the costs you mention in this post in other words]) is peer review. I wonder, Jane, with all we see about midlist fiction being squeezed and, therefore, genuinely good material not finding a regular home, whether you foresee a similar peer reviewed subsidy model in “quality fiction” with publishers having panels of reviewers like the academic presses do? Is this the kind of hybrid model that might have a place?
The ones who target schools are particularly reprehensible. As you say, they don’t charge the kids or parents to be published, but they print everything they are sent, write the child a letter full of praise telling them they have been “published”, and charge the parents £15-£16 for a paperback. No complimentary copies.
I have extensive correspondence from a couple of years ago with one of these rip-off companies after they targeted my children’s school – “Young Laureates”, one of the many faces of the one based in East Anglia. It’s quite astonishing the way they attempt to brazen it out and claim that “overheads” are the reason they can’t afford to pay contributors. I hope that Sheffield local authority, at least, is now getting the message thanks to my putting the literacy co-ordinator in the picture. She was quite shocked and promised to feed it back to the wider literacy group in the authority.
Dan Holloway wrote:
Dan, I don’t know much about academic publishing, but I did hear that the Society of Authors was looking into it, in order to attempt to get a fairer deal for writers. I’ll see what I can find out (I have a good friend who is a Professor who I think was very much involved with that) and let you know.
I have one word for you: Authonomy.
Actually, I think that’s what editors already do. Only they help authors skip the subsidy bit, for the most part. Which is a Good Thing for those authors.
DanielB wrote:
I agree. And thanks to you alerting me to the racket I spoke to my son’s junior school about it and they avoided falling into exactly that trap. What’s even better is that we talked quite a bit about it and they’ve now produced a collection of poetry using POD which they’ve sold for £3.50 a copy. The kids are all thrilled to be in a book; the teachers are really pleased with the project: it’s been a fabulous learning opportunity for them all. I’ve asked the head teacher to let the LEA know all about it, as they really have done very well with it and it’s a model other schools could copy.
My sister in law’s daughter’s school was offered the chance (gah) to publish a book like this. I warned them about it but they still went ahead. The books have under 30 pages in and sell for £18.50, and are very cheaply produced–my parents in law have a copy and told me that my neice was “following in my footsteps” and was a “real published writer” now. I nearly had to leave the room.
@ Jane Smith:
I meant for the kind of fiction we’re being told agents & publishers don’t take on regardless of quality “in the current climate” because the market is more akin to that in academia where even the very top imprints will charge. I had in mind panels of reviewers similar to those used by academic publishers – small numbers of the very top people in their field, the equivalent being prize-winning authors, those agents who’d love to take work on but for the climate, top editors. The finished product would be the same quality as a regular published book, but with an initial print run of a couple of hundred, so that commerciality wasn’t an issue (as it isn’t with academic mongraphs, which are there to reward an academic whose work is outstanding with a publication that carries weight from the peer review element [as well as all kinds of things tied to funding for their department, of course]) – so editors would, as you say, be doing just what they do now, but without market constraint. I wasn’t really asking whether it was a good idea so much as whether you thought it was something that might be tried out?
“Authonomy” – ha ha! I, er, didn’t mean that kind of peer
On the anthology thing – yes, I’ve seen a lot of great projects done using POD in Oxfordshire, none of which has cost more than about the £3.50 Jane quotes. I am involved in judging and organising a live show for Oxford International Women’s Festival Poetry Competition
http://eightcuts.wordpress.com/events/oxford-international-womens-festival-poetry-competition/
All proceeds go to charity, but one of the things we will do is produce a przewinners’ anthology, which will be sold at the Festival and through its website. Prizewinners will all get complimentary copies – which will get paid for out of the sponsor’s pocket (er, that’d be us at eight cuts gallery).
Dan, I can’t see the advantage to the peer review system you’ve suggested. What would it achieve? The books would still have to be edited, designed, typeset and printed, so the initial costs wouldn’t be much reduced (the printing bill wouldn’t be much reduced as prices are lowered drastically when lots of copies are printed: it doesn’t cost much more to print 100 or 500 copies). What would the peer review system achieve? How would it sell the few copies which were printed? What would it do to make those books a success? I’m sorry, I just don’t understand how you think this would work. Please explain!
Sorry, I was musing mainly, a propos what differentiates academic form vanity presses when they both work on a subsidy basis. The difference is peer review, leading into a proper publishing industry standard edit and whatnot by a legitimate publisher, who then prints a small run and markets them.
My musing was whether this peer review + subsidy model could apply to fiction – even by mainstream publishers. The point being that if there is great fiction that’s being squeezed and agents and publishers would like to take but can’t because of the limited market, this would mean a publisher could take the book on, and give it the full treatment, including marketing, but not lose commercially (they might also surprise themselves with successes). That’s what I mean by hybrid. If academic publishing shows Yog’s Law isn’t universally applicable, then the issue is more complex than we think – I was wondering about ways subsidy publishing could be non bloodsucking vanity fare. Better to muse and be shown wrong than not to think? I certainly wasn’t thinking of doing it – we have a model at eight cuts gallery press I’m very happy with, and EVERYTHING flows from us to the author
I agree in principle — it’s an endorsement of an author’s work for a publisher to invest capital in that author. (And essentially, a publisher is a fund of capital and a conduit for marketing, promotion, etc.)
BUT there’s quite a large grey area in terms of the author’s investment of their own time and sunk opportunity costs in spending so much time writing in the first place.
Thinking of the likely non-commercially published authors who are the vanity publishers’ target market, then these people are going to be working without any advance from a publisher. They’re doing a lot of work for nothing anyway and if you cost that time out, even at the minimum wage, you might be looking at around £28k investment in time (given 6 months working on it 40 hours a week).
This doesn’t meant to say that new writers should sign up with vanity publisher but that many of them have put in a big investment personally already — and the above doesn’t count course fees and all that sort of stuff.
This may be off topic … but I’ll take the plunge, anyway. (Jane: feel free to delete or move this to another thread where it might be more appropriate.)
I’m a book designer and typesetter, with a little bit of history in the offset printing world. (Note: I’m using the term POD to mean print-on-demand as a manufacturing process rather than POD as a business model).
There are stark differences between the manufacture of offset and POD paperbacks, but the one I’d like to bring up is durability.
An offset book’s pages are divided into signatures (this is the US term; I believe the UK term is ‘extant’, but I could be dead wrong!) of 16, 32, or 64 pages that are printed on large sheets of paper which are then folded and stitched along their own, individual spines before being collated into the entire book. At this point, the book manufacturing process heads in different directions: hard covers involve details that aren’t used in the soft-cover process.
So, for an offset-manufactured soft cover book, this is what happens:
The collated signatures (which can be up to 1/8″ thick, or more) are glued onto the spine of the book’s cover … and therein lies the difference. Each individual page of a POD-manufactured book’s spine is glued to the spine. Think about it. Look at the edge of a piece of paper. That’s where the glue is landing, as opposed to the thicker and sturdier edge of a 16- or 32-page signature.
While we don’t expect our soft-cover books to hold up the way our hard covers do, we’re going to be hugely disappointed when that POD book’s spine splits open like an over-ripe banana after only a few readings.
[...] How Publishing Really Works: Reverse Vanity Publishing [...]
@ Maggie Dana:
Maggie, to continue off track, that comment takes me back rather nostalgically to my days in the flooring trade, when I would explain (at endless length to the credit of their patience for bearing with my geekiness) the difference between tufted and woven carpets. A tufted carpet is made, in simple terms, by firing separate tufts of thread through a mesh, which is then glued up wholesale. Each thread in a woven carpet runs the length of the roll, and each loop of that thread is held in place by a separate high strength rod. I loved taking samples, pulling them apart with customers, showing them what this meant, and I’ve only just realised it’s the same exactly with bookbinding. Thanks for the memories – I’d better go before I go into depth on the difference between wiltons & axminsters
Dan:
I’d love to learn the difference between wiltons and axminsters because I love learning how stuff works. If you’re ever of a mind to share, consider me all ears.
Maggie
@ Maggie Dana:
This is very interesting to read, because the POD books I have seen have all been of significantly inferior quality to the other kind. People have tried to persuade me otherwise, but the ones I have seen have all been pretty cheap and nasty, and easily differentiable from “the real thing”.
I have another rule of thumb that I add to Yog’s Law.
If it looks like a shortcut to book publishing success, look again and then another time.
This applies equally to publishers and to writers. I work only with publishers (although a few of them are authors who self-publish). Every single major mistake I’ve seen (and had to try to fix!) has started with a “shortcut.”
This is an inherently complex business, and you need to look very, VERY carefully for unintended consequences before you do something out of the ordinary.
Instead of being taken by vanity publishers, consider learning how to publish on your own! Click here to learn more about self-publishing.
Sam, I’ve had a look at the link you provide and the first thing I saw was an amateurish website, funded by ads for vanity publishers.
When I read the copy, it got even worse. The site is badly written, the advice given is flat out wrong in many ways, and I wouldn’t trust anything I read there.
Thanks for trying to help but really–that’s a terrible website which won’t help anyone who is serious about a writing career. If you link to it here again, I’ll delete everything you’ve written here.
Replying to Jane Smith:
Oh dear. That’s NOT a good ‘un, is it? Still, the reference to writers/publishers ‘risking their lives’ made me snort with laughter!
The copy isn’t good. Waffly. Takes ages to get to the point. Loads of ‘professional’ (huh) words jammed together. Someone needs to find their point and stick to it!
@Maggie Dana:
Offset presses can do several types of binding. The Smyth-sewn casebound is most durable, but often more expensive. For long books with long print runs, it becomes a time-sink. The Smyth-sewn signatures are still glued into the book, same as most other books.
Notch binding (cutting notches into the folded backs of the signatures through which the glue accesses the pages) has greatly improved over the years. A book bound today will last a lot longer than a similar book bound twenty years ago.
Perfect binding (grinding down the back of the book block and getting glue on the full edge of all the pages) is quite durable these days (more durable than notch, IMO), again because of improvements in the glue. Mass market paperbacks are bound this way, and those are intended to hold up to multiple readings, deliberately-cracked spines, and being hauled around in beach totes.
The failure of some POD printers is that they don’t have good quality control. Large offset printers have people frequently checking the glue–which must be reformulated depending on the local humidity and temperature in the plant that day–to be sure it’s optimal.
Can you comment on Tate Publishing . . . are they a vanity press, are they reputable?
Thanks,
Replying to DFH Crume:
Tate Publishing is a vanity press. I wouldn’t even consider submitting to them.
If you want to find out more, there’s a good discussion about them here:
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=992
I’ve repeatedly tried to reply to some of their blog posts but they won’t approve my comments: perhaps because I ask them too many difficult questions. Who knows?