Vanity Press

From Guidevines, a user-editable wiki for writers

From Guidevines

Professional publishers pay the authors money for the privilege of selling their work, on which the publisher plans to make a profit.

Amateur publishers pay the author nothing or only an honorarium for the privilege of selling their work, for the love of the genre.

Vanity presses suck as much money as they can out of authors in order to make their profit.

Many of the older vanity presses, also known as subsidy publishers, like Carlton House, did produce books nicely typeset and bound. But no vanity press actually markets or expects to sell outside of the circle of the author's friends. They make all their money directly off the writer.

Vanity presses that actually deliver a bound product are probably the best choice for non-commercial books:

family or local-cemetary genaeology

a cookbook of your favorite recipes for your kids and others who have enjoyed them

most people's autobiographies or memoirs, which are primarily of value to those who know them; also biographies of or tributes to those near to you

and so on. They can provide the easiest way to get a moderate number of copies well-made.

Vanity presses are NOT the place for anything you hope will become a best-seller or otherwise make you a lot of money.

If you have a non-fiction book that might sell big because of your opportunities to promote it in line with your business (motivational speaker selling how-to book in that range, cosmetic shop owner or workshopper selling beauty book), you are better off self-publishing because the costs will be much lower and the format more flexible if you deal directly with the printer yourself.

Vanity publishers are absolutely a detriment to developing a reputation as a professional writer. You are better off having published nothing than to say in a letter to a professional publisher that you have all these novels published by (fill in a list of vanity publishers). The first emptiness merely says you are new to the field. The second looks self-vaunting, delusory, ignorant of the business, and hints you might be an ego-problem to the publisher.

Now--

[edit] That Was the Good Side of Vanity Presses

The abuse of authors by bad vanity presses is the stuff of financial and artistic nightmare. A bad vanity press may

hijack your copyright in an agreement you sign
take your money, and more money, and give you nothing, not even poorly bound copies, in return, only promises and excuses
send you to a disreputable book doctor (there are legitimate ones) for a first soaking (say, $10-$20 a page, on a 200-400 page manuscript), which book doctor is another member of their gang

and so on. One of the best exposés of the vanity press abuses (and fake agents and all the rest) is the Writer Beware pages at SFWA by Victoria Strauss, who has collected far more horror stories and names of villains than anyone just beginning could hope to.

Of course, vanity presses have moved on-line to find all the more victims: note the Publish America scam.