[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*