Quote:
Originally Posted by davidnpauly
My book is published by Black Rose Writing. It's a hybrid of Printing on Demand and Traditional ones.
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I'm looking at their website right now (and wincing in pain) and trying to figure out how it's a hybrid. It looks like a straightforward vanity press to me so far. One with a hideously awful website. Could you please give me a link to their explanation, so I can just look at that and not have their bad writing and worse Geocities-level layout hurt my brain?
Writer Beware,
Preditors & Editors, and
Absolute Write seem to consider them a vanity publisher as well. If I were looking for a publisher, a bit of googling would lead me to cross Black Rose off my list. So would a look at their website -- I don't want a publisher whose representatives' writing looks like the material for one of those "find ten mistakes in this paragraph" tests, or whose website looks like a bad example from Web Pages That Suck (yes, that's a real website ).
Yeah, I know I keep going on about the website ... but seriously, it's any business's public face, and this one is ugly and its designer dresses it funny. I've ragged on Baen for being really bad, but at least it doesn't hurt my brain.
A real publisher pays you money for specified rights to your book. They perform specified services. They do specified things to promote it, not "within our budget" which seems to be what Black Rose offers*. It's all in their contract. And most important, their goal is
selling books, not selling printing services to authors. In fact, that's a good definition of a vanity press: a company which considers authors an asset rather than a liability, in a financial sense. That is, one for which the authors, rather than sales of their books, are a revenue source. Selling books to their authors does not, by the way, count as sales of books, and that seems to be Black Rose's biggest money maker.
Also, legitimate publishers have nothing to hide. They don't make flowery promises with nothing but more flowery (or just florid) language behind them. They don't get all butthurt when people ask them questions about their products or services, or accuse questioners of trying to sabotage their ideals. Vanity publishers do.
There are uses for vanity presses. I'm working on something I'll probably pay to get printed because it's not marketable, and I
know it's not marketable; it's just stuck in my head and needs to come out, and it would be fun to have it with covers on. So when it's done, I'll try to find an honest vanity press or POD place to print me up some, cash on the barrelhead. But I won't pretend that's "publishing" or anything else but, well, vanity. There are also obscure niche books that an author might be able to sell better than any publisher -- things that appeal to a specific market, often a segment of a profession, where the author is known and respected and knows most of the people personally. Plus, of course, there are things like my grandmother-in-law's cookbook ... nothing that matters to anyone outside the family, and pure gold to all of us. That's not commercially marketable either (who wants someone
else's grandma's recipes?) but one of the relatives shelled out to a cookbook-printing place to get one for each of us. Those situations, though -- my vanity, the obscure specialty, the family cookbook, etc. -- are few and far between. Most people who "can't" get published are either trying the wrong places, or are trying the wrong thing (i.e., your manuscript isn't "too good" for them; your manuscript
sucks). The answer is to do more research, be more selective about your targets, write better queries, and fix your bleedin' manuscript, not pay good money to someone who sees you, not your readers, as their primary revenue source.
*I'll promote your book to the limit of what's in
my budget too. Of course, that happens to be $0.00, but I haven't seen any proof that Black Rose can do any better.