Publishers Relegated to Printers

[taustin]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Correct.
More to the point: vanity publishing is when the author is exploited by the printer and never makes a profit. What we are discussing is *indie* p-book publishing, which is a business approach used by savvy hands-on authors who wish to retain their copyrights and still have access to the pbook markets.

Vanity publishing:
Author pays all costs up front
Author retains all rights
Author is responsible for all marketing
Author gets all profits.

Indie publishing:
Author pays all costs up front
Author retains all rights
Author is responsible for all marketing
Author gets all profits.

The only changes are that the up front costs are lower, and marketing is easier and cheaper. But it's still vanity publishing unless you make a full time job of the marketing, same as before.

There are people how have made literal fortunes self-publishing through a vanity press, because they did make a full time job of the marketing. The tools change, but the game is the same as always.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by crossi

That's what contracts, lawyers and small claims courts are for. Anyway why would an author write a book, go to a publisher with no intention of publishing the book? A publisher might rarely, very rarely, get burned for the cost of editing but I doubt it would happen often enough to hurt their bottom line. What happens to anyone who hires a service and doesn't pay for it?

The point was that if the author do the marketing of the book he is probably not willing to pay a lot of money to try to sell more books just to pay the guys that edited the book. The author does not have the same situation as a publisher in this regard since the publisher have more books that can succeed.

[Sydney's Mom]

Publishers have to unbundle their services. And I wish they would start with the pricing guys at Penguin!