Vanity and Self Publishing Guide

We’re always on the side of the book. We’re always on the side of the writer.

With books, we want them to be as good as they can be – written well, edited well, pressing clients to be as wonderful as they can – and if you have the guts and determination to pick up a pen and write a book, we’re on your side. And that’s why we are firmly, emphatically, viscerally opposed to vanity publishing in all its forms. Because vanity publishers take vast sums of money from authors to publish their books. This is in contrast to how to best practice in both traditional publishing (where publishers pay you) and modern eBook-led self-publishing where it costs nothing to upload your book to retailers like Amazon, and where per book royalties are excellent. 

Vanity publishers never call themselves by that name. They’ll say they offer ‘partnership publishing’ or ‘hybrid publishing’ or say they offer a ‘contributory contract’ or anything else of that sort. But if any publisher:

1.   Asks you for money

2.   Ends up owning the rights to your book

You should regard them as a vanity publisher. That’s if you’re polite and inclined to be generous. Quite frankly, we prefer to think of them as thieves and fraudsters.

WHAT VANITY PUBLISHING LOOKS LIKE

We’ve spoken to one writer who was offered a ‘contributory contract’ from one vanity publisher requesting from her a staggering £7,000 to publish her poems. This lady was dying of cancer, and she wanted to earn a little something for the son she’d leave behind. Thankfully, she called us first and asked for our advice.

What we told her was this:

There is not meaningfully any the market for poetry, and certainly not of the (sincere, but quite home-spun) verses she’d written.

·         She would never see that £7,000 again

·         Sales would be modest in the extreme. Aside from any sales, she made to friends and family, her sales would quite likely be zero, nothing, nix, nada.

·         she almost certainly would get a nicely produced book to hold in her hand

·         she would not find that book being sold in bookshops

·         Yes, the book would be available on Amazon, but so are 5,000,000 other titles. Uploading a book to Amazon is easy. Selling it once it’s there – that’s hard.

·         She would not, meaningfully, get any marketing support from the publisher once the book had actually been produced.

·         In effect, she’d be paying £7,000 to have her book printed & the rights owned by somebody else. You could easily spend no more than £1,000 for a book of that length, print as many copies as you wanted, work with lovely, truthful, well-intentioned people, and still, retain all the rights to the book.

Naturally, she did not use that publisher to ‘publish’ her work. Instead, she went to a reputable local printer and, for a modest sum, got the thing printed up for local distribution. She told me that she wanted everyone who came to her funeral to get a copy.

And look, there’s something good here and something awful. The good thing is that a dying woman made a book that she wanted to create. That spoke her thoughts to those she cared about.

SELF-PUBLISHING

If you don’t want to go that route – too hard? Too slow? You don’t want to lose control of your book? – Then modern self-publishing is also an excellent answer. Modern self-publishing involves selling your book via Amazon and/or the other e-tailors such as Apple. You will make a majority of your sales – perhaps over 90% of them – via eBooks, but it’s perfectly possible to create and sell print-books as well. They’ll be of good quality and will be available to readers all over the world.

The advantages of self-publishing include:

• Royalties are superb: Amazon pays 70% royalties on eBook sales, whereas traditional publishers will pay just 17.5% (or less, if you include the amount you’ll owe your agent.)

• It’s easy

• It’s fast

• You reach readers right across the globe

The disadvantages include:

• You have to handle the various bits and pieces yourself: cover design, eBook formatting. Most people will just outsource those tasks, but you still need to find the right people for the job.

• Because of those tasks, you are likely to pay something to get our book published – but $1500 / £1000 would be a perfectly reasonable budget for most.

• You have to market your book. Amazon is a platform; it’s not going to market on your behalf unless you have some prove sales potential already.

• There is still a difference in kudos between self-publishing and the traditional sort. That doesn’t really make sense to us. (Who do you admire more: someone who sold $100,000 worth of self-published books on Amazon? Or someone who got a £1000 book deal from some remote bit of Penguin Random House?) But still: it matters to some people.

If you want to find out more about how to self-publish your work, you can find out with our (characteristically comprehensive) guide here. Info on book descriptions here. Info on categories and keywords here. Advice on getting your book covers here.

It’s also true that writing really well is a skill that can be learned – and then learned some more. If you’ve struggled with literary agents in the past, it may well be that your actual book isn’t as strong as it could be. For that reason, we’ve got useful advice on how to write a book right here, and we’ve also put together some hints on getting started with writing your novel right here.