Nov 21 2008
Vanity Press
The traditional way to self-publish is with a vanity press. Vanity presses never call themselves that, of course, because of their bad reputation. Instead they may use a variety of names, the latest being “subsidy publisher”.
These presses, whatever they promise (and they often promise a lot) are nothing more than printers. You pay them to print a few hundred (or a few thousand) copies of your book. Some vanity presses try to disguise this fact by dressing up their charges as “editing” or “marketing” fees - but in reality, any editing or marketing they do is sketchy at best, and the fee simply pays the printing costs.
And then the question is, how do you sell all those books you’ve got sitting in your garage?
