How are books published? (Part 2 of 3)

The last article was about how some terms get thrown around carelessly when authors, publishers and booksellers get together, and those terms become confusing. The article covered “traditional publishing,” a misnomer; commercial publishing; and print-on-demand (POD) which is actually a printing technology that has spawned a new business model, rather than a form of publishing.

Today, you’ll learn about two more forms of publishing.

Vanity publishing. Vanity publishing is often described by simply reciting a litany of some of the most egregious vanity publishers. While naming a few of those is not a bad thing, it doesn’t define a vanity publisher.

A vanity publisher is a company that will publish almost anything you commission it to publish, with little to no selectivity. (They usually have clauses against publishing dangerous or illegal information, explicit pornography, hate speech, etc. These are things that could get them into trouble.)

Here are some warning signs of a vanity publisher (but there are others):

They brag about huge numbers of authors. Do you really think a publishing house with several thousand active authors actually has time to give any of those authors any personal attention?
They say things like, “We will publish anyone’s book!” or, “We accept more new authors than anyone else!”
They accept even stuff that is patently drivel, and tell the author how marvelous it is. You may not want to believe this about your OWN stuff, but there have been cases where authors have intentionally sent in garbage and have gotten rave reviews from vanity publishers.
They are very expensive! Even if there is no setup fee, their books are usually much higher than competing books in the marketplace.
Make the majority of their money from the author's payments for services rather than from the sale of books.
Some vanity publishers have clauses in their contracts that prohibit you from making any public criticism of their business or how they treated you, and if you do violate that contract, they can take you to court!

Don’t get taken in! If you are truly desperate to publish your book very soon, and are unable to get a commercial publishing contract, try a subsidy publisher instead.

Subsidy publishing. Subsidy publishers, at first blush, may look like vanity publishers because they offer some of the same services. They will publish your book for a price, and usually have editors on staff or available. But here is the big point that separates them: Subsidy publishers are selective. They will not publish just anyone who comes to them and is willing to pay.

Why not? Some books simply are not ready for publication. They are in need of copyediting or of substantive book editing. Maybe the overall concept is a poor one, maybe the book idea is stale, or maybe the writer doesn’t have the requisite grammar and compositional skills.

Accepting someone’s money to publish a book that is not ready to publish is simply setting them up for failure.

Here are some other points that separate subsidy publishers from vanity publishers:

A subsidy publisher they will not insist that they do the editing. But, they will insist that the book is well-written and edited.
A subsidy publisher will be honest with you about the commercial viability of your manuscript.
A subsidy publisher will give you clear title to your rights.
A subsidy publisher will help to promote your book.
A subsidy publisher will listen to what you want to do with your book, and if they are not a good choice for you, will tell you so and refuse to publish your book. Not every publisher is a good fit for every manuscript.
A subsidy publisher will work with you to find an acceptable price point for your book and will not set you up with false hopes about huge numbers of books being sold.

Occasionally you will hear about something called a "cooperative publisher." Essentially this is another name for a subsidy press. The cooperative part means that the publisher also has a financial stake in the success of the book, and does not make most of its money by charging you, but rather by selling your book. This is how a decent subsidy publisher works, vice the vanity publisher.

Now, some people are going to disagree about this differentiation between subsidy and vanity publishers. That’s fine if they disagree. A lot of the disagreement will come from authors on opposite ends of the author spectrum.

People who have been published by vanity publishers don’t like to think of it that way. Nobody likes to have their bad choices exposed to make them look dumb, you know? Probably people who bought Edsels and Yugos defended their purchases passionately in public—but in private they kicked the car doors and wished they had made other choices.

On the other end of this continuum, many people who are commercially published sneer at any other path to publication, and lump vanity publishers, subsidy publishers and self-publishers all into the same camp, The Great Unwashed Authors. They didn’t “pay their dues” by seeking agents for years, then seeking a publisher for years, and stacking up piles of rejection notices. To them, this lessens the accomplishment.

While the outlook is understandable to some degree (after all, who likes to see someone else cut to the head of the line?), what is it about writing as a creative art form that somehow differentiates it from music or filmmaking as a creative art form? People praise the independent band who scrapes up enough cash to pay to have a record cut—as long as the music is good. People rave over the independent filmmaker who sells his car to buy a new camera and gets his friends to act for free—if the movie is thought-provoking and/or entertaining.

Why is it then that the independent author who writes a decent book, fiction or non-fiction and scrapes together the money to have it published, is looked down upon as a lesser literary lifeform? And it’s not that the book is necesarily bad. It may be, or it may not be a badly written book. But many authors, librarians, and booksellers never even open the vanity- or subsidy-published book. After all, if it wasn’t commercially published, it must be junk! (That was sarcasm.)

Now, here’s the sad truth: most of the time they are probably right about vanity-published books. Most vanity-published books have had little-to-no editing, and the lack of selectivity means that almost anything can be published. (If you've been checking the links in this article, you can see that.)

This has become much longer than planned, so the topic of remainders will be carried over into the next article. Sorry!

"Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders."
Walter Bagehot, journalist and author 1826 - 1877

Quotation taken from The Writer's Journey Journal

For more info: See these links:

PublishAmerica non-editing fiasco

AuthorHouse complaints

SFWA General Warnings List

Another "sting" manuscript accepted by PublishAmerica

Come back and read the next article where you'll learn about self-publishing and the scary world of hurts and remainders!