Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
I'd add:
Three: You are trying to build up some sort of reputation and following to increase your chances of getting a publishing deal.
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From my understanding, unless you generate exceptional sales (in the thousands), reputable publishers do not consider vanity press and pay-to-play to be publishing at all. That is, you're
less likely to get them (or an agent) to look at your work if you admit to vanity publishing in the past; at the very least, you're no better off than you would be if you were coming in totally raw.
The services that actually provide editing, design work, marketing assistance, and so on, are, as I understand it, quite expensive, because you get what you pay for. I have to wonder how many of the "hey, I wrote a book!" people are going to spend the money to buy that assistance, and how many are hand their money to a less honest (but cheaper) company, which will end up being something that saves their DOC as a PDF, gives them a list xeroxed from
Writer's Market, adds some generic suggestions on selling a book, and charges them hundreds of dollars for those "services"? Given the number of vanity press products (going back to the pbook days) that show no sign of having been within sight of a proofreader, I'm fairly sure that most end up with the latter.
I've talked to people who said they haven't considered real publishing because real publishers "throw out most of your story and rewrite it the way they want." I've never been entirely certain if what they actually meant was "turned it into something at least vaguely resembling English" or if they seriously believed the things that some of the vanity presses tell them. As I think we can all tell from that signal-to-noise ratio, there
needs to be, at the very least, some kind of proofreading involved. I'm in a discussion with a fellow in another thread whose response to my pointing out (okay, kind of making fun of) some errors in his blurb for his book wasn't to rush off and fix the errors in the book, or even the blurb -- it was to bring his brother in as a sock puppet to praise his book. That seems to be the reaction of the vanity press victims, too. The companies looting their wallets don't scare them off by telling them their stuff is unreadable; they tell them it's "special genius" and should be published exactly as it is. Which it is. And then everyone else looks at it ... stares at it ... goes "huh????" ... and deletes it.
In other words, it's kind of backward. The people who could most benefit from professional advice are least likely to acknowledge they need it, let alone seek it out, while the people who seek it out already know they need something, which is far more than half the battle, and are therefore more likely to
start with something readable. More likely, in fact, than people like the lady in that newspaper article are to end with one.
And yeah, I blame the vanity presses. They ignore the truth, shade the truth, or flat-out
lie in order to get people who might have a chance at real publishing, or might have a good book with some editorial input, to give them money. In the end, their real customers are always their authors ... and everyone but the vanity press owners loses.