Vanity Pubs really aren't all that bad.
“Brigitte,” Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor, is available on ebook and audiobook. Follow the link to find them on Amazon:
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The following is an imperfect transcript of this episode. A complete transcript can be found on the show’s webpage.
[00:00:00] Last week, we concluded our little mini section of this series of pitfalls of writing with talking about layout with giving some good guidelines on how you should be laying out your text if you are self-publishing. Today, we are moving away from cover art design and text layout, and we are moving on to bigger things.
[00:00:28] We are moving on to what happens after your book is done, or at least kind of. For this episode, we are going to be talking about vanity publishers today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello. Hello. Hello, and welcome to the show. It is another Wednesday and I don't know about where you live, but here in Northern Utah, we've had another bout of cold weather. It snowed the other day. So we had to kick on our heaters again and here we are reliving like the eighth winter of this year.
[00:01:21] Welcome to Writing in the Tiny house. I am Devin Davis. I am the host of this show and I am the guy who writes things and tells you about it. And the whole point of this podcast is to give you the tools and the knowledge necessary to produce a short story in as little as three months, or to produce a novel in as little as 18 months, but to hopefully give you the wisdom and the foresight to adjust that timeline if you need. It is rare to produce a work that quickly, but it can be done. So today we are going to be talking about vanity publishers. I am a part of many different Facebook groups in this little world, and it seems almost every day or about every other day, somebody gets on the Facebook group and asks who should I pay to publish my book?
[00:02:10] And here is like just upfront, this is a big misunderstanding. In traditional publishing if you want to be traditionally published, you will not pay any money for them to publish your book. In fact, With a traditional publisher, what they will do is they will take your book and pay you an advance on that book, and then hopefully pay you royalties after you have earned out your advance. Most authors don't earn out their advance by the way. If you are in a relationship with a company who says that publishing is what they do, but they are asking for you to pay them money, they are not a traditional publishing company. Traditional publishing companies, like I said, they pay you.
[00:03:03] They pay you for your book. They pay you for the content that you are offering them so that everybody makes money through sales. A traditional publisher also will offer, well, we'll assign you to an editor and to a design team of some sort, and you may be involved with the design. You may be involved with the image production of your book. You may get to say yes or no to your book cover. You also may not. You may not even get to title your book. They may retitle your book, but all of that is the process of the traditional publisher. So we go through this, we have a book ready, we feel that it is time to take the next step towards releasing it out into the world for people to get it and to buy it and to read it.
[00:03:52] And we see these other companies who are offering publishing services, but you get to pay them. There is nothing wrong or evil about these companies. I do feel that they are misleading sometimes, but if a company is offering publishing services in exchange for you giving them money, they are what we call vanity publishers.
[00:04:19] And what a vanity publisher does is they offer you the services of doing the steps of self-publishing for you. When you publish under a vanity publisher, it will likely be under your name. You will have the rights to the book. And they may offer a few perks, like a newsletter or a magazine that circulates within their company.
[00:04:44] Or they may have some connections here or there. They can probably get your book into some brick and mortar stores. I mean, there's always some form of a catch or a perk that is attractive to people who don't necessarily know what they're looking for. And none of that is bad. Some of that can be good to the appropriate customer.
[00:05:06] If you are a person who has more money than they have time going through a vanity publisher, if you're not interested in querying and submitting to agents and going through the whole rigamarole of trying to traditionally publish sometimes approaching a vanity publisher as a way to do the self-publishing for you can be a very good thing just because self publishing takes even more time and it takes even more dedication and more brain real estate for your project.
[00:05:45] And if you are a busy person, like I said, who has more money than they have time sometimes hiring a company to do those steps for you will save you a lot of headache and allow you to free up some space toward other projects that you have going. The issue is that a lot of the vanity publishers are not transparent about what they are offering.
[00:06:09] Your book would still be considered self-published and That's just how that is. That's how vanity publishing works. Sometimes they will offer services to create a website for you. Sometimes they will offer a little bit of social media services, like. Offer you a spotlight on some of their platforms or offer you this we're that.
[00:06:30] And the thing is all of those services are valuable. It is absolutely okay to have some recognition and to have some spotlight stuff on social media. Great to be able to tap into that type of a resource. The thing is with these vanity publishers, they usually cost a lot of money for you to take your book from start to finish.
[00:06:52] Sometimes it can be upwards of $5,000. Sometimes it can be more than that. But the thing that they do offer is the connections to all of those different things. they know the artists, they know the people who can lay out your book. They have all of that ready because it is their business plan. They have the answers, they have solutions for that and you pay for it.
[00:07:15] that is what a vanity publisher does. That is what they are for. They are to do the steps of self-publishing for you so that you can finish your project or you can move on to something else or so that you don't have to kind of figure out all of the different steps with self-publishing in order to get your book ready.
[00:07:36] And that's okay. However, a vanity publisher is not a traditional publisher. I don't think that I can say that enough. And it all just boils down to an exchange of money. If they are giving you money, they are traditional publishers. If you are giving them money, they are not. This episode is definitely shorter than all of the other little episodes in this series of pitfalls of writing. But that's where we are. Vanity publishers are not bad. if you are giving somebody money in exchange for doing all of the steps for self publishing, your book is still going to be self-published.
[00:08:13] And so just be aware of where your money is going and what the end result is going to be. So there's nothing. That, but next week we are going to be talking about marketing. So once you have your book ready, the fight isn't over. So join in next week. As we talk about marketing on writing and the tiny house.
[00:08:34]
[00:08:34] And that is it for today. Just a reminder that "Brigitte,"Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor is available on Amazon as an ebook and on Audible and Apple Books as an audio book. And I provide advanced reader copies of these short stories as I release them to my patrons. So become a patron today by visiting patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse to support both my writing and this podcast. And lastly, be sure to follow me on social media. My Instagram is @authordevindavis and my Twitter handle is@authordevind. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today and have fun writing. We will see you next time.
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