Quote:
Originally Posted by 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".
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There's a whole ecosystem out there feeding on the desire of folks to be published authors, and offering a variety of pay for services to them. The one fortunate thing is that the vast majority of author wannabes never reach the point of a completed manuscript, so we're spared a considerable amount of awful stuff.
Some vanity publishers
do provide services. The oldest and longest established is Vantage Press, around since 1949. They have editors to help turn the manuscript into something publishable, and designers to create readable books with decent covers. They even promote, taking ads in places like the NY Times Book Review. But what you pay for is X number of copies of a printed, bound, professionally produced volume. Actually
selling the book is on you, and you pay all costs.
If you know that going in, I can see cases where it might be a reasonable option. Too many folks don't seem to get the concept, think that publication through Vantage or less reputable similar outfit means instant success, and are vastly disappointed when they find themselves with thousands of books with no market.
In one sense, I kind of regret the impending demise of vanity presses because of ebooks and POD solutions with low or no up front costs. They're a filter medium. You could still get pretty much anything published back when through a vanity outfit, but it
cost, and the costs spared us a lot of bad books.
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Dennis