{"id":669,"date":"2005-07-11T21:32:00","date_gmt":"2005-07-11T21:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/why-its-a-bad-idea-to-pay-a-vanity-press-to-publish-your-writing\/"},"modified":"2017-02-26T20:55:11","modified_gmt":"2017-02-26T20:55:11","slug":"why-its-a-bad-idea-to-pay-a-vanity-press-to-publish-your-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/why-its-a-bad-idea-to-pay-a-vanity-press-to-publish-your-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Why it’s a bad idea to pay a vanity press to publish your writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vanity publishers will publish anything<\/i> if the author has the money, be it a family history to distribute to relatives, a guide for classes, or a volume of badly-written poetry. With a vanity press, there’s no editor making an informed decision as to whether or not the manuscript in question is good, bad, or indifferent. The lack of a “gatekeeper” makes all works published by vanity presses suspect in the eyes of the publishing world.<\/p>\n

Thus, the lack of editorial process is the first reason that writers, reviewers and editors scorn books put out by vanity presses.<\/p>\n

The second reason is that many vanity publishers are crooks, plain and simple.<\/p>\n

Many vanity presses — and bogus literary agents who work with or own vanity presses — advertize in the backs of literary magazines and appeal to a frustrated writer’s, well, vanity<\/i> in assuring them that their opus will see print.<\/p>\n

What’s not mentioned is that the costs will be high, the quality of the product low, and its chances of being taken seriously lower still. They also don’t mention that they’ll push the services of a “book doctor”, who will charge you high fees to “improve” your manuscript. Some vanity presses will take an author’s money, but never actually print the books. Vanity presses engage in a lot of borderline or outright scamming; they ensure their own profits, and the clauses in their contracts often create a situation where the author becomes their best customer.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is this: the money should flow from the publisher to the writer, not the other way around.<\/p>\n

If you submit a manuscript someplace and the “publisher” writes back praising the work to the heavens — but then says you need to pay an “editing fee” because your manuscript has a few weensy problems and they know someone who can fix it right up — run fast and don’t look back. Likewise, if your inclusion in an anthology is contingent upon your buying<\/i> the anthology, you’re dealing with a vanity publisher who is trying to take advantage of you.<\/p>\n

The same goes for many publishing contests (frequently poetry contests) that require a fee. Typically, these scams want you to pay $25-$50 as an entry fee, and the work of all the “winners” (read: everyone who shelled out the entry fee) goes into a large anthology that the “winners” are pressured to buy. These things sometimes get announced in the “community” section of smaller local newspapers, falsely lending legitimacy to the scams.<\/p>\n

A few of the vanity publishers out there include:<\/p>\n