Authors have heard the term a-plenty. “Vanity press” is quick off the lips of some agents, a phrase that doesn’t help many people. We might all start by accepting that publishing a book, in any way, is an act of ego. It had better be. Showing the world your wares is a brave act. You need your swagger on to get published, believing in yourself when nobody else has so far.
But “vanity press” is from the 1930s. You’d pay someone like Vantage Press to publish your book and then some paperbacks would be printed to sell at a store or through an ad in a newspaper or magazine. You were usually in charge of the selling, just like Virginia Woolf was in charge of earning sales of From the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, once she and her husband had printed the books in their living room.
The term vanity publishing stuck, though, like gum on the underside of a theater seat. If all those references — printed newspapers, magazines selling a book via the mails, gum on a theater seat — feel out of date, consider how nearsighted using vanity press is for authors with finished books today. One numbskull said in a comment on YouTube, “If you pay, you were not published. You were printed. Have enough respect for the business to understand that if no publisher wants your novel, it is probably because you need to improve as a writer.”
Because that’s the vibe that the traditional publishing crowd pushes, day after day. “No acceptance, no quality” is too simple to be true. There are many reasons why a well-crafted, reworked book wouldn’t get a deal, as I like to call a publishing contract. Your book isn’t better just because an agent accepted it, trying to sell it. You’ve proved yourself to the agent, and nothing more, on the day you sign a contract to represent your work.
What you read to know better
This isn’t a rant against agents — well, not against the ones who understand how textured and multicolored publishing is today. You can comprehend that, at least as well as an agent, by reading the right resources. You can’t even know what a publisher is trying to sell without knowing how the business works. An author skips this part at their own risk. You’re creating the product with an eye toward who might read it. Understanding that is a part of your job as a creator. The answers lie in a handful of books about how a book gets chosen for publishers to link it to readers.
So You Want to Publish a Book? by Anne Trubek. Written by a regional small press publisher, it includes a meaty chapter called “How Much Does It Cost to Publish a Book.” If a company presents you with a bill for $1,500 to publish your book, you flee. Nothing can be published for that amount that looks like a book. It costs more in time and in money. When you start getting considered for a $5,000 publishing offer, start asking about how much budget is devoted to promotion and marketing.
The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Mike Shatzkin and Robert Paris Reger. The authors not only take a thorough accounting of the current book publishing model, they predict what will happen now that Amazon is the elephant in the room. Shatzkin publishes a blog that adds even more. If you care about being published, his advice is invaluable. Vanity comes up just twice out of the 46,000 words in the book. This must not be a thing anymore, although people go pie-eyed when they get approached by a publisher.
People’s Guide to Publishing: Building a Successful, Sustainable, Meaningful Book Business From the Ground Up, by Joe Biel. The founder of Microcosm Publishing explains all the skills of the trade, including budgeting, distribution, and printing choices.
What Editors Do, by Peter Ginna. This editor and publisher with 35 years of industry experience dares to explain the difference between line editing and copyediting, and so much more. If you lust after the traditional book deal, the riches of what any publisher should promise are outlined in fabulous detail. This is a book of essays by experts, from children’s book editors to a freelance editor who edits journal manuscripts written by non-native speakers of English. No matter what kind of book you write, you’re represented in Ginna’s book.
All of these books see the world of publishing in its entirety, not in some fogged-over telescope into the past. All four of these books were written within the last five years. It’s not unusual to see publishing advice for sale at Amazon that was written before Amazon created Kindles. Beware of counsel that’s past its sell-by date.
Beware also of the industry worker who likes to use “vanity press” while they urge you to contact them instead. There are often agents of a certain persuasion or age, steeped in another era’s history. Non-agented publishing is not their forte. You won’t see them produce a YouTube video on what the thousands of authors a year who the agent passes up should do, after that agent’s pass. No advice for authors who strike out with indie and university presses, either. After all, there’s not much money in there to sell your work to a press that won’t pay an advance. If you’re unpublished, there are other resources than listening to agents don’t have anything more helpful and and thorough to say other than “write better” or “get a better day job.”
