Vanity Press Spoofed

[stacer]

Basically, vanity presses appeal to your vanity, tell you that this is the way publishing works.  I have quite a few friends who, until I explained to them that normal publishers actually pay you to publish your book, thought it was normal for writers to have to pay to have their books published.

I get lots of junk mail from vanity presses. The kinds of claims they make include how they'll publish your book if it's good, and how many "authors" they've "helped" start their careers, etc. The thing about Publish America is that they pay you $1 in an advance to make it seem like they're a real publisher. But then they make you pay for the publication of your book, and don't support it with marketing or distribution. They're not discriminating--the SFWA authors here were trying to prove that they'll pretty much publish anyone who pays.

Self-publishing has its place. If you have a niche market, or a very small run, it might be worth it to self-publish. I might do that someday for a family history I've been meaning to finish--something like that is of interest only to my family and a select number of other researchers. (Though nowadays it's cheaper to just go to Kinko's and have it copied and bound there.)

But if you're talking about a book that you want to go to the bookstores, a real publisher will invest in your book. They'll pay you an advance, which makes them need to work to market and distribute it, so that it's sure to earn that much money back, and hopefully more. Vanity publishers have no incentive to market your book, because you're paying them. It's like agents who charge reading fees. They're making their money off naive authors, not off the actual market.

[Skar]

Slightly off topic question:

If the book a publisher paid you an advance of five thousand dollars for only makes four thousand dollars, do you owe the publisher one thousand dollars?

[Fellfrosch]

No, because it's not your job to sell the book, it's theirs. That's why a company that pays no advance usually means trouble, because they have nothing invested in your book and thus have no motivation to market it. If they pay your 5000 in advance and then fail to market it well enough to make that back, it's their own dumb fault (and someone is probably going to get fired).

[stacer]

Actually, many books don't earn out their advance. So someone probably isn't going to get fired, but the publisher might not accept that author's next book, or if they do, they go for a smaller print run.

[Skar]

Thank you.  "Advance" always reminded me of getting an advance on a paycheck and I wondered.

[EUOL]

Yes, it's a common misconception that you have to earn back your advance to be successful.  The most successful books out there generally never earn out their advances--the author was paid far more than they would get from royalties because the publisher really wanted the book.  

Some math:

The author earns about $2.50 off royalties.
The book ends up selling a 1000 copies, so the author has earned $2,500.
The publisher has paid them $3,000 as an advance.  

Yet, the book sold 1000 copies at $25, or $25,000.  The publisher doesn't get all of that--actually, they get a small amount.  However, even if they only earn the same amount as the author, that's $2,500.  They've given an extra $500 to the author, but they're still in the black $2000.

Now, multiply this by a scale where the advance was around 10 Million, and you're talking Hillary Clinton's book.

[Fellfrosch]

I would like to add that Atlanta Nights, in addition to being atrocious, is thoroughly engrossing. I can't stop reading it.

We should do something similar here.

[fuzzyoctopus]

I would totally do it.


Gemm can write chapter 34.

[Fellfrosch]

That's exactly what Mustard and I said

[stacer]

And the author's name would have to be Stet Cannister.

(That's what it was, wasn't it?)

[Mistress of Darkness]

Ah, good ol' Stet. How I miss him.

[Fellfrosch]

Yes, the intrepid Stet Canister. Truly a giant in the publishing industry.

My initial thought was that bad fantasy is too easy to write, so we'd have to go sci-fi, but the more I think about it the more I'm convinced that we could lampoon the fantasy genre much more easily.

[House of Mustard]

But it has to be well-written crap.  The temptation with either sci-fi or fantasy is to write parodies, which wouldn't be nearly as funny as writing really bad serious SF/F.

[Fellfrosch]

I can't believe I read the whole thing. By the time I got to the computer-generated chapter I was laughing out loud, but my favorite was the chapter when one of the characters woke up to realize it was all a dream...and then in the next chapter the story kept going anyway. Or maybe it was when one character suddenly became black, or when another character suddenly became a woman, or when a millionaire orders caviar on "triscuits or wheat thins or something," or...I can't pick a favorite moment. This is the most expertly-written crap I've ever read.