The vanity press strikes again

[Worldwalker]

*grumble*

I just read a newspaper headline about a writer getting her NaNoWriMo novel published. I dove straight for the article ... what publisher? Who's buying? You know, the stuff we all want to know. After a description of NaNoWriMo and the story, however, it turned out that there was no publisher; the writer had paid a vanity press to print her book. POD, to be exact.

She wanted to "share her book with the world" (aka "the 10 relatives who will actually buy some random POD book") and didn't want to wait "months" to get an agent, so she got suckered into paying a vanity press for what might have been a marketable novel. She got what she paid for -- a hardcopy of an un-edited, un-reviewed book. Something that will never even make back the hundreds of dollars she paid for it.

And I just got mad.

I don't know if it's a good book or not. I'm not going to pay nine bucks for a PDF to find out, and I'll never see the (equally overpriced) pbook in a bookstore. It might be a good book. It might be a book that could be edited into a good book. But it'll die the death of vanity press books because the "you get what you pay for" people convinced her that's how "they" all do it ... convinced her that a vanity press is an accepted alternative to real publication. I know there's no way to reach these people. The POD printers got there first. Sunk Cost Bias will keep them from ever listening to anyone who points out they've been ripped off. There's not a bloody thing I can do except scream on MobileRead.

*scream*

[neilmarr]

My own house signed a book a while ago that later turned out to have been written for the NaNoWriMo challenge. It was a very ound concept and not at all badly penned. BUT ... thirty days for the author to write it and almost a year in edit with me to get it right! Taking raw manuscript to press is an insult to the reader -- at any price. Neil

[Steven Lake]

I see NaNoWriMo as a good exercise for people who want to improve their writing skills. I however *DO NOT* feel that it's ready for the big time. Not by a long shot. Case in point. Most of the books I write take 2 weeks to 3 months to complete the raw draft. After that it's 12-18 months of upgrades, major edits, minor edits, cleanup edits, more edits, even more edits, and finally polishing edits before I'm even partially confident that it's remotely close to being ready for an editor to look at, let alone be published.

So for me you're looking at no less than 15 months before any of my stories are what I would consider to be even remotely close to publishing quality. And I don't let them out of my site until I feel they are. So to me, any book that had only seen 30 days of work spent on it would automatically be considered landfill to me if it were published without significant cleanup editing.

[neilmarr]

Right you are, Steve. Thing is that NaNo can be used in various ways: it can encourage word-production disciplines; it can help force the completion of an idea; or -- in the case I mention here -- it can get a good spontaneous idea roughed out on paper to the stage where it is pretty well editable before that idea goes away.

All three uses seem pretty valuable to me.

Where the NaNo challenge can be misinterpreted and abused in these days of instant 'publication' is when writers think that just because they've managed to churn out 50K words to a deadline, their work is fit for human consumption. I guarantee ... it ain't.

Cheers. Neil

[Worldwalker]

But it does, apparently, make its participants ready and willing victims for the "give us money and call yourself an author" scams known as vanity presses. *sigh* For that matter, remember the old "Library of Poetry"? I sent them a poem once that was, of course, a semi-finalist ... that a friend and I generated by computer (I think it was some bits of 18th-century poems recombined at random; it's been a while). They went well beyond bad and into scary.

What's kind of depressing is that there's a story I might some day pay to have printed. It's not going to sell to a publisher because it's not marketable; I knew that when I started writing. It's just something stuck in my head that I need to get out. But if I do decide to pay someone else to make a hardcopy of it (POD, most likely), I'll know what I'm doing going in. It'll be something I want to spend money on for the fun of actually having it sit on my shelf, much like I buy lottery tickets or fancy meals, rather than because I think anyone but me will ever actually want to read it. The deluded people like this NaNoWriMo author pay to get their books "published" and think they've actually done something -- and it's something that "real" authors do. It reminds me a bit of those photography tours where they pose a tame critter for you, and tell you exactly where to stand, what camera settings to use, etc., and then you can tell people you took that picture, just like the other twenty people who were with you ... and you pay through the nose for it.

The level of self-delusion required in the case of the photographers is disturbing; in the case of the writers, I think the vanity press does most of the deluding. The ones I've talked to know little or nothing about how publishing works, and what they know (or think they know) comes straight from the vanity press. And, of course, they're all "too special" or "too unique" for publishers. Well, yeah, their treatment of the English language is generally "special" ... and not in a good way. But as for their "special" books, they're usually either whacked-out conspiracy theories that nobody with two brain cells to rub together can take seriously (see xkcd 808) or poorly-written biographies that nobody but their family members (if even them) would want anything to do with. Oh, and there was one who persisted in perpetrating fantasy novels that could put you to sleep even if you were mainlining Red Bull; can't forget him.

I think it says something about today's society: everyone thinks -- knows -- that they have something to say. But they've never considered whether it's something that anyone else on the face of the Earth actually wants to hear. So they say ... they write ... they scream into hurricanes ... but nobody's listening, because what they have to say is interesting to themselves and themselves alone.

[K-Thom]

And your point about eBooks is ...?

[Worldwalker]

For one thing, the fact that she (via said vanity press) is selling it as an ebook as well as POD. As I said above, nine bucks for a PDF. That's half again the price of a professionally-published, DRM-free epub at Baen. Twice or three times the price of other indie books at Smashwords.

For another, ebooks seem to be the new target for the vanity presses. It's a great deal for them. In this case the base price of a book is over $300, and that's if you provide your own cover and make no changes; it's easy to double or triple that. Her breakeven point would be (at minimum costs) 50 books, at which point the vanity press has collected over $450 from her ... for a book they've done nothing to or for except turn from a DOC into a PDF, stick an ISBN on, and provide sale space for. No editing, no proofreading, no nothing. If she bought a template cover and one revision, that would be $700 to earn back, or 90 books, and the vanity press would have pulled in nearly a grand without doing anything, or at least without doing anything that requires more than the services of a minimum-wage high school intern. Nice money if you can get it.

Any further questions?

[Steven Lake]

Worldwalker: Even without NaNoWriMo there are tons of gullible people out there. However, if there's one thing I've learned in the brief time I've been in the publishing industry is this. Most authors who go to vanity publishers (not *all*, as there are a surprising number of really good authors who chose the vanity/pod/PTP route not because they don't feel their stuff is good enough for prime time. The majority do it for...well, vanity reasons. I talked with a bunch of other writers at some of the local book shows I've gone to, and it's shocking how bad their books are, but yet they strut themselves around like kings. And god forbid you dare say one bad thing about their book. Their "precious", as Golum liked to say.

So I think the better way to look at the publishing world, or even "vanity" publishers is this. 90% (or to some degree even more than that) of all books published by them are by authors who have no right carrying that title, because they're not writing because they love it. They're writing and publishing in order to feed their own egos, and give food to their own self importance. Seriously. Cause I don't feel that all authors who go to vanity publishers are bad authors, nor are their books. Yes, it's a small percentage, but they are out there. Even in a worst case scenario where 99% of all authors who publish via a vanity publisher are ego basket cases, there's still that 1% who are really, really good.

I've seen some books come through the likes of Booksurge that are so good if you didn't know any better, you'd think that they were done by one of the big houses. The same rule applies with self published authors. Some want to do it themselves and don't want to be bothered with the hassle of the submission process, rejections, etc. So they instead do all the footwork, get the ISBN themselves, get it printed themselves (or professionally through a printing house), do the marketing, etc.

So saying that all authors who go the vanity/POD/PTP/SP route are bad is wrong. As I said, I've seen some in that category with books that would knock your socks off, but chose the route they did for personal reasons. It's like me. I prefer small publishing houses because they treat you like a human (well there's other reasons, but that's the biggest one with me.) and you get better returns on your books. And yet, there are people who would bash me and call me a substandard author simply because I'm not big house published.

Now, do I think that there needs to be a better way to find the truly good indie authors? Yes, I do. Goodreads is a good start, but could use some work. Now Simon Royle, a member here at MobileRead, has a system he's starting that I believe would be a good start in the right direction towards solving that issue. Namely, if you're indie published, regardless of the flavor, and you don't have at least a 4.0 or higher cumulative score (I might settle for something as low as 3.5 if I thought it might be worth reading) from 5 independent reviews, then you aren't worth reading.

Expanding on his idea a bit further, if it takes off and a nationwide (or worldwide) network of independent reviewers gets established, having those, plus the professional reviewers out there, would go a long way towards filtering out all the bad stuff and letting the good stuff settle to the top. Oddly, it might even have the nice secondary effect of discouraging the influx of bad indie authors that's happening right now. Wait, no, scratch that. It'll stop the *good* authors with writing that's not up to par, forcing them to get better before releasing their works. It'll never stop the bad ones, because they are so ego driven that they have no idea they're actually really, really bad. hehe.

Anywho, that's my 2c. Spend as you like.

[Worldwalker]

I don't think I said they were all bad, Steven. I said they were fruitful targets for vanity presses that were after their wallets, giving them nothing they couldn't get elsewhere cheap or free. Plus they think they've accomplished something, which nicely combines denigrating the efforts of real authors with never giving themselves the chance for the commercial success they might have had, if they do indeed have a good book. They lose everything, particularly their money, and gain nothing except, perhaps, egoboo. And it's false ego, since it will crumble to dust when they find out how publishing actually works, like the poetry "contest" winners.

It would be one thing if they walked in with their eyes wide open and knew they were just doing something to give to their family, like the cookbook a relative of mine did (oh, could she cook...). But they don't; they've been told that this is how other authors do it, and that they'll make vast sums of money from their hundreds of dollars of "investment", and instead they're left with a nine-dollar PDF, little more than they could have made on their own computer.

[bobavey]

I feel your pain.

[Dahak]

I was under the impression that Amazon allows just about anyone to self-publish through the Kindle.

Is that impression mistaken?

If true, it just means that the signal-to-noise figures are that much worse.

[Worldwalker]

As I understand it, pretty much, yeah: anyone who wants to can lock their book in Amazon DRM and sell it through the Amazon store to an Amazon-controlled device. I sure wouldn't do it ... but there's worse. The author whose vanity book started this paid for a PDF of unknown DRM status (I couldn't find out in a quick look) sold only by a vanity press nobody has ever heard of, and as a POD paperback which is currently #943,776 on Amazon. Yeah, even worse -- despite paying hundreds of dollars for the "service".

And that's where the problem comes in. Sure, it would be DRM-locked and Kindle-only if the author sold it as an Amazon ebook. But at least people would be able to buy it from a reputable and available source. And it would have been FREE to the writer. Instead, that writer paid hundreds of dollars and got less ... because the vanity presses say that's how everyone does it. Hence my peevishness. What Amazon (or Smashwords, or pretty much anyone else who accepts open submissions) does isn't worth the hundreds of dollars a vanity press charges. It might or might not be worth the zilch that Amazon, etc., charges, but certainly no more. Yet charge they do ... a bare minimum of over $300 to this individual ... and poor deluded people think they're "authors" and their bestseller is right down the street. Just as soon as they get above #943,776.

[simonroyle]

First of all you can "set" your book to be non DRM on Amazon. You can. It is a fact. As a writer who wants to sell books, Amazon is somewhere between 80-90% of the market. So to avoid marginalizing yourself you have to be Amazon.

Secondly, books sold on Amazon, can and are read on Computers, Ipods, Ipads and a host of other electronic devices - not just the Kindle.

Regarding your rant against the "author" who slapped her NaNoWriMo on Amazon and stuck a price tag of $9 on it. I agree with you 100%. London Bridge has also been sold several times. I'm guessing she'll sell about the number of copies you predict.

In Thai we have an expression, "Som Nom Na" - literally translated it means, "You deserve it" - so to her, Som Nom Na. If you want to be an author that sells books then that wish has to be treated with respect. Not just for yourself but for the many others who are writing great Indie books and, often, burning the midnight oil on both ends of the candle to do it.

Now let's get to serious Indie Authors - the one's who treat their work with the same vigilance (perhaps more these days) as a NY Publishing House. Producing an indie book of quality means:

- writing a good story
- getting it professionally edited by a known editor
- having a cover professionally produced
- working out what distribution model is best
- getting the legal stuff sorted (ISBN, taxes etc)

The above is the reason that "self-published" doesn't work for the majority of quality indie authors these days - they don't do it alone. I certainly haven't.

As for distribution I will go with ebook on Amazon, Smashwords (excluding Kobo because the discount will screw up pricing at Amazon), and Pubit. I was originally only going to produce ebook, however since a few people asked I will put it through Createspace POD. Perhaps later, because they will have a facility in Australia covering AsiaPac (where I have a few hundred contacts) I will go to Lightning Source. I estimate ebook to print sales of about 50-1.

Why did I go down this route? Mainly on the advice of this guy, who worked on Tag with me. There were several reasons:

- Cross genre: Literary, science fiction, technothriller, thriller (try getting that across in a query)
- Time conservative estimates were 2 years from date of landing a sale
- State of the market - looking at it as a businessman I think there'll be a huge shift within next five years - when that happens I want to own ALL of the licensing rights for my work
- Word count: 130,000 words = immediate rejection for a debut author (this despite my own research here on MR which says most people love long books)
- Did I mention time? The first draft of Tag was finished in March 2010. It'll launch on or about 5th December 2010. The time in between has been proofing, editing, more proofing and more editing. Marketing and cover design. That six months (next time I reckon I can cut it to three) is still a heck of lot shorter than the two years people were talking about.

To make it clear. I have nothing against mainstream publishing - I buy their books often (less so now that I have found so many great authors here on MR); their business model just didn't suit me. If they come knocking on my door, I would listen to what they have to say.

I'd want to know:
- How big is the check you've got in your hand, unless there's six numbers before the decimal point, we can save ourselves some time.
- What promotion will you put behind the book beyond what I am doing
- Super important - what are your thoughts on ebook pricing (or can I retain my electronic rights)

Depending on the answers to above I may or may not go with them. These days another way of looking at Vanity is ~ I am published by a mainstream publishing house ~ I got a 10K advance, a 5k print run, and I pay for my own travel on my "book tour" ... a different kind of vanity.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by simonroyle

Regarding your rant against the "author" who slapped her NaNoWriMo on Amazon and stuck a price tag of $9 on it....

She didn't, though.

She paid to have it "published" by a vanity press that nobody will ever hear of. The POD book is on Amazon (in the remote possibility that anyone might order it) but the ebook isn't. If I wanted to buy the ebook today, I'd have to know where to go, set up an account with that place, and buy the book -- the PDF, that is, because it's only available as a PDF. She could have done that herself. She could have put it on Amazon -- even with all their restrictions -- for free. Instead, she's limited herself to a tiny percentage of the pbook market (because face it, is anyone who doesn't know the author going to spend fifteen bucks to order a POD paperback of some indie book, when they could buy a couple of MM paperbacks of authors they've heard of for that price?) and her ebook might as well not exist.

That's why this whole situation annoyed me so much with vanity presses and their predatory tactics. The newspaper article (okay, it's a pretty sorry excuse for a newspaper, but it does print on dead trees) made it clear that she thinks she's a published author. Her "success" was held up as an example for others to aspire to. I don't know if her book was any good; it might well be the next Pulitzer prize winner. Nobody will ever know, because the article made clear she didn't even try to get it published; for the reasons that appear so prominently in vanity press talking points, she went straight to pay-to-play, and what might have been an excellent book (okay, Sturgeon's Law says it wasn't, but there's a chance) will be buried forever at #943,776. The ebook will forever be an unread PDF ... she won't even be lucky enough to get pirated, because why would someone pirate a book they've never heard of when there are familiar books to be had?

And the paper is telling readers "Write a NaNoWriMo book, and you can be a Real Author by paying to have it published". I was at a naval museum a couple of days ago. In the gift shop, you could buy hats, any kind of hats you wanted. Pretending that someone is an author because they paid to have a book printed and PDF'd is like me buying an admiral's hat in that gift shop and claiming to be an admiral. Except there are people who believe it ... and those people will be further prey for the vanity presses. Further innocents who will shell out their hundreds of dollars for unproofed PDFs.

Hence my rant. Deserving or not, I hate seeing people fleeced by unscrupulous operators who are charging hundreds of dollars for something a person can do themself in an afternoon.

[simonroyle]

My apologies, not enough coffee, I read your post (rant) wrongly.

"Hence my rant. Deserving or not, I hate seeing people fleeced by unscrupulous operators who are charging hundreds of dollars for something a person can do themself in an afternoon."

Agreed.

Did you buy the hat?