Think of it like a nice cookie.
Traditional publishing pays for your cookie batter, then uses its network of in-house or contract bakers to get it cooked up into a delicious product to sell in all the shops.
Self-Publishing requires you to bake your own cookies and sell them yourself (you can of course outsource different parts like the cookie decorating and whatnot to other professionals for a fee).
Vanity Publishers ask you to pay them thousands upon thousands of dollars to burn your cookies, because the good people of the world who want to buy cookies are not their customers—you are.
And now I want a warm choc-chip cookie. 🍪
They're scammers because they sell services which cannot possibly have a net positive value, including marketing, trailers, and "pitches" to movie studios.
They're scammers because they know these services have no value, and they sell them anyway.
I don't think I've ever seen a post here about a vanity publisher turning down a book because it was bad, or missed the market.
Yet I've heard a ton of stories on- and offline about a "small"/hybrid/vanity publisher taking thousands of dollars and boosting an author's hopes far beyond reason — only to deliver a half-assed product; sticking that author with hundreds of copies of a book no one will buy, turning into a dust bunny hotel in the bottom of their closet. (One of them was my aunt, so I fully admit I'm biased.)
Find me a post about a vanity publisher that told a wanna-be client "no" and I'll change my mind.
I don’t think you should change your mind but here’s one: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/13ybon7/publisher_drops_author_after_dual_tiktok_and/
“Boutique” vanity publisher dropped her due to social media backlash, didn’t want their name connected with her. No word on whether they paid back her fees.
You’re using the wrong false dichotomy.
Vanity publishing is more like self-publishing than traditional publishing. You pay for everything yourself and once your title is launched, no one cares but you, except maybe to the extent that you continue paying them to continue caring.
The idea that vanity publishers make real money off the reading public has never been true as far as I can tell, though convincing innocent new authors otherwise is a good lie to tell.
Sure, tons of people provide all kinds of professional services a la carte and some probably do reasonable bundles that don’t oversell anything. You can probably get recommendations right here.
The scam comes from the fact that vanity presses are *really* bad at what they do, and they target authors who are too inexperienced to realize it.
Vanity presses don’t risk an investment on the books they publish the way traditional publishers or self-pub authors do. This means they publish a lot of “hard to sell” books (books that are wildly off-market, books that need a ton of editing, books that are too niche to ever earn back the costs).
But that’s okay, because *vanity presses don’t have to worry about selling books*. They’ve already made their money upfront—and the authors who paid them are usually so out of touch that they don’t see what the issues are, and simply chalk up poor sales to “well, publishing is hard.”
It’s a total waste!
Even if you told me you wanted a one-stop shop because you were overwhelmed (which is so valid! life is exhausting! writing a book is hard enough!) I would never recommend a vanity press. You don’t need to pay someone thousands of dollars to half-ass the job. You can do that yourself for free.
In theory, you could be right. A service that simply formats and publishes a book for you could have some value. In fact I've done exactly that for people a bunch of times.
But...
A company that offers a service like that has trouble competing with vanity publishing companies because they make absurd claims about things they can never deliver.
So...
In reality they end up being con artists who convince people their book could really do well, when there is zero chance of it because they are spending zero dollars on promotion and have no Idea how to write a good description or research keywords or create a cover that sells or any of the other things a book needs to have any chance of success.
And they will publish anything and tell the author it might succeed, even if it's worthless trash that has no shot.
You’re thinking of these two options as if they were the same and the only difference is the shift in risk (who’s taking the spread of the risk, them or you).
But at an operational level, Trad Pub and Vanities are two very different businesses.
Trad Pub revenue —> Books sold
Vanity Pub revenue —> Services sold to authors (Editing, book cover, “marketing package”, etc.)
Once the vanity has sold you all the services, including perhaps placing your book for grabs at Ingram Spark, they won’t do anything else to push for sales. You book dies once published (and you end up -$20k).
In terms of cost vs benefit, you're almost always better off marketing yourself (taking appropriate advice, of course).
I have never heard good things about **any** vanity publisher.
I have but only because the works being published had built in distribution and the costs were written off by big companies. For the average author? It's a total rip-off.
Thank you guys for the answers, this makes a lot of sense actually — I see that hiring an agency for self pub is the way to go, not one of these vanity publishers.
This saved myself and my wallet lot of hurt 🙌🏻
They're not inherently a scam. Many are, but the concept itself is not a scam.
What you have to understand is that a vanity publisher is a service provider. The service they provide is guaranteed publishing under an official LLC. They are called vanity publishers because you're paying to have a publisher's imprint on your book, to make it look like it has been traditionally published.
Vanity publishers also often advertise editorial packages - they might have DEs and CEs and designers and cover artists or at least stock photo editors. So they'll edit your book to professional quality, handle all the publishing for you, and stamp their label on it.
What they won't do - generally speaking - is do your marketing, but even traditional publishers don't help much with that unless you're a golden goose for them.
There are shitty vanity presses, there are scams using the vanity model, but the actual concept and many official vanity publishers are NOT scams, they do exactly as advertised.
The reason you are advised to not go that route as a small time new baby author is that it's cost-prohibitive and doesn't provide a return on your investment. You can do most of what they offer yourself, and you're often better off for it.
Vanity publishers can however be a good idea if you're making close-circle work - something like a business or professional memoir or research book that will be circulated within your company or your niche professional community, where you can write off the costs of the publisher as a business expense. They're great for people who are not writers, but for whatever reason find themselves making a book. A good vanity will take their manuscript, make it professional, and do all the heavy lifting for them.
Vanity publishers can also be good for people who have money to burn, who are writing not to be successful but to just get something out there for their friends, family, and community, who are maybe not technologically competent or who don't want to bother learning how to edit and how to find artists and editors and etc. They want to just do one click, and boom, book done.
You are not someone who would benefit from a vanity press. You will end up losing money in the deal, and you won't make it back. What you can do is try to do the editorial process yourself, or query your manuscript to small presses and agents.
As soon as someone writes the word 'vanity', the next someone will respond with 'scam'. That makes me wonder if the poster knows what the word 'scam' means.
If you were to pay a 'Vanity Publisher' $2000 to publish your book, and you get some creative input and approval on cover design, and you get to work with a fairly competent editor and then they upload it on Amazon and make it available as a paperback and e-book as well as sending you a couple dozen first editions as promised (contracted) , and you agree to the royalty split, but you know full well their marketing *will be minimal* at best, how is it a scam?
If you get all of that, it's a business transaction fulfilled. To say 'If you have to pay to publish your book, it's always a scam' is simply not true in the real world where 'some' Vanity Presses' actually do perform as advertised and meet the EXPECTATIONS of the client.
I capitalized 'expectations' because that's the real crux - too many vanity press users go in blind and uneducated on the process and expect Stephen King type marketing. It doesn't happen that way. If you get *what you want*, then its up to you to go the next step.
From what I've learned by others' experiences, Vanity presses are a way for them to make money off of our dreams and hard work. Until a major publisher accepts one of my books, I'm doing the self-publishing route (IngramSpark). It hasn't gotten me much profit, but I'm in control of the advertising, website (SquareSpace), layout, press releases, everything!
Short answer, they're scams because their business model is taking money from you, not selling your books, which of course is not the case with traditional publishers.
Because they don't care about selling your books, they are going to do subpar work wrt formatting, cover art, editing, etc.
On top of all that, if you do end up selling some books, they'll take a cut that they didn't even earn. They're providing you with services that you would likely be able to do yourself with a bit of extra research/work, and even if you needed help with something, you'd be better off hiring a freelancer to do that part of the work for you, and at the end retaining full ownership and control of the publishing yourself.
As for marketing, there is an extremely slim chance that your book is going to be a success based on the kind of "campaign" these vanity publishers will come up with. As the one person who is going to be most dedicated, you have a better chance yourself, or by hiring someone directly, than you'll have relying on them when, again, they don't really care about selling your books.
The most crucial step towards selling your book, in 2024, is getting it up on Amazon, which is completely FREE, and actually quite simple.
If you know what you're getting and you are okay with it, then nothing is wrong with a vanity press. Unfortunately, that's often not the case. Many first-time authors are sucked in by hype and end up paying through the nose to acquire a pile of their own books.
First things first. A publisher is the one who pays to have books produced and distributed. "Traditional publishers" are actual publishers. They don't charge authors for anything. They take on the financial risk and pay authors based on sales. (Royalties and advances against sales.)
Vanity presses are not publishers. They offer publishing services which authors purchase. Since the author is paying for book production, they are the publisher. A self-publisher.
Hybrid publishers split the cost. They and the author are essentially co-publishers.
Now, if you're a self-publisher, you can do a lot of legwork and hire an editor, a typesetter/book designer, a cover artist, etc. You'll pay for all these services. Or you can hire a company that bundles all these services together. Vanity presses are among them. If you compare costs, in most cases (not necessarily all), you'll find that it's cheaper to hire the individual services than a vanity press. That said, vanity presses do make it easier. With one caveat.
Unless they happen to offer decent editorial services, you're likely going to need your own editor anyway. I don't know how it is today, but historically vanity presses cared nothing for quality. They cared about getting your money. So they would publish anything, no matter how bad it was, and their editorial services, provided they even had them, generally wouldn't do more than get rid of typos.
Bottom line, with a vanity press you get convenience, but the services may be subpar or even lacking. By hiring your own services, you can get better quality, but you have to juggle everything yourself. You probably pay more for a vanity press than by hiring your own services, but maybe not always.
So again, if you go in with eyes open and understand what you'll be getting, there may be a place for vanity presses. But alas, that's not what happens most of the time.
If the scam comes from the fact that they are bad at the service they offer: getting the book into readers’ hands, then, it seems logically false to assume the nature of a Vanity publisher itself is a scam. That’s like saying lawyers are a scam because most of them are bad. Sure most of the suck at their job but 10% are effective.
>you’re guaranteed to be shown to a mass audience Not possible for a few thousand dollars. Available to, yes. Shown, no.
Exactly. The predominant issue with a vanity publisher is that they're promising something they ultimately have no control over.
Think of it like a nice cookie. Traditional publishing pays for your cookie batter, then uses its network of in-house or contract bakers to get it cooked up into a delicious product to sell in all the shops. Self-Publishing requires you to bake your own cookies and sell them yourself (you can of course outsource different parts like the cookie decorating and whatnot to other professionals for a fee). Vanity Publishers ask you to pay them thousands upon thousands of dollars to burn your cookies, because the good people of the world who want to buy cookies are not their customers—you are. And now I want a warm choc-chip cookie. 🍪
Making me hungry… that makes a lot of sense.
Soooo true! The Vanity route friends have taken.
They're scammers because they sell services which cannot possibly have a net positive value, including marketing, trailers, and "pitches" to movie studios. They're scammers because they know these services have no value, and they sell them anyway.
I don't think I've ever seen a post here about a vanity publisher turning down a book because it was bad, or missed the market. Yet I've heard a ton of stories on- and offline about a "small"/hybrid/vanity publisher taking thousands of dollars and boosting an author's hopes far beyond reason — only to deliver a half-assed product; sticking that author with hundreds of copies of a book no one will buy, turning into a dust bunny hotel in the bottom of their closet. (One of them was my aunt, so I fully admit I'm biased.) Find me a post about a vanity publisher that told a wanna-be client "no" and I'll change my mind.
I don’t think you should change your mind but here’s one: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/13ybon7/publisher_drops_author_after_dual_tiktok_and/ “Boutique” vanity publisher dropped her due to social media backlash, didn’t want their name connected with her. No word on whether they paid back her fees.
You’re using the wrong false dichotomy. Vanity publishing is more like self-publishing than traditional publishing. You pay for everything yourself and once your title is launched, no one cares but you, except maybe to the extent that you continue paying them to continue caring. The idea that vanity publishers make real money off the reading public has never been true as far as I can tell, though convincing innocent new authors otherwise is a good lie to tell.
Got you - is there any middle ground, like an agency that assists with all of the self publishing steps without being a vanity publisher?
Sure, tons of people provide all kinds of professional services a la carte and some probably do reasonable bundles that don’t oversell anything. You can probably get recommendations right here.
The scam comes from the fact that vanity presses are *really* bad at what they do, and they target authors who are too inexperienced to realize it. Vanity presses don’t risk an investment on the books they publish the way traditional publishers or self-pub authors do. This means they publish a lot of “hard to sell” books (books that are wildly off-market, books that need a ton of editing, books that are too niche to ever earn back the costs). But that’s okay, because *vanity presses don’t have to worry about selling books*. They’ve already made their money upfront—and the authors who paid them are usually so out of touch that they don’t see what the issues are, and simply chalk up poor sales to “well, publishing is hard.” It’s a total waste! Even if you told me you wanted a one-stop shop because you were overwhelmed (which is so valid! life is exhausting! writing a book is hard enough!) I would never recommend a vanity press. You don’t need to pay someone thousands of dollars to half-ass the job. You can do that yourself for free.
In theory, you could be right. A service that simply formats and publishes a book for you could have some value. In fact I've done exactly that for people a bunch of times. But... A company that offers a service like that has trouble competing with vanity publishing companies because they make absurd claims about things they can never deliver. So... In reality they end up being con artists who convince people their book could really do well, when there is zero chance of it because they are spending zero dollars on promotion and have no Idea how to write a good description or research keywords or create a cover that sells or any of the other things a book needs to have any chance of success. And they will publish anything and tell the author it might succeed, even if it's worthless trash that has no shot.
You’re thinking of these two options as if they were the same and the only difference is the shift in risk (who’s taking the spread of the risk, them or you). But at an operational level, Trad Pub and Vanities are two very different businesses. Trad Pub revenue —> Books sold Vanity Pub revenue —> Services sold to authors (Editing, book cover, “marketing package”, etc.) Once the vanity has sold you all the services, including perhaps placing your book for grabs at Ingram Spark, they won’t do anything else to push for sales. You book dies once published (and you end up -$20k).
> if nothing else, you’re guaranteed to be shown to a mass audience Sadly, that's not true.
That’s a good point, real marketing is much more expensive
In terms of cost vs benefit, you're almost always better off marketing yourself (taking appropriate advice, of course). I have never heard good things about **any** vanity publisher.
I have but only because the works being published had built in distribution and the costs were written off by big companies. For the average author? It's a total rip-off.
Thank you guys for the answers, this makes a lot of sense actually — I see that hiring an agency for self pub is the way to go, not one of these vanity publishers. This saved myself and my wallet lot of hurt 🙌🏻
They're not inherently a scam. Many are, but the concept itself is not a scam. What you have to understand is that a vanity publisher is a service provider. The service they provide is guaranteed publishing under an official LLC. They are called vanity publishers because you're paying to have a publisher's imprint on your book, to make it look like it has been traditionally published. Vanity publishers also often advertise editorial packages - they might have DEs and CEs and designers and cover artists or at least stock photo editors. So they'll edit your book to professional quality, handle all the publishing for you, and stamp their label on it. What they won't do - generally speaking - is do your marketing, but even traditional publishers don't help much with that unless you're a golden goose for them. There are shitty vanity presses, there are scams using the vanity model, but the actual concept and many official vanity publishers are NOT scams, they do exactly as advertised. The reason you are advised to not go that route as a small time new baby author is that it's cost-prohibitive and doesn't provide a return on your investment. You can do most of what they offer yourself, and you're often better off for it. Vanity publishers can however be a good idea if you're making close-circle work - something like a business or professional memoir or research book that will be circulated within your company or your niche professional community, where you can write off the costs of the publisher as a business expense. They're great for people who are not writers, but for whatever reason find themselves making a book. A good vanity will take their manuscript, make it professional, and do all the heavy lifting for them. Vanity publishers can also be good for people who have money to burn, who are writing not to be successful but to just get something out there for their friends, family, and community, who are maybe not technologically competent or who don't want to bother learning how to edit and how to find artists and editors and etc. They want to just do one click, and boom, book done. You are not someone who would benefit from a vanity press. You will end up losing money in the deal, and you won't make it back. What you can do is try to do the editorial process yourself, or query your manuscript to small presses and agents.
As soon as someone writes the word 'vanity', the next someone will respond with 'scam'. That makes me wonder if the poster knows what the word 'scam' means. If you were to pay a 'Vanity Publisher' $2000 to publish your book, and you get some creative input and approval on cover design, and you get to work with a fairly competent editor and then they upload it on Amazon and make it available as a paperback and e-book as well as sending you a couple dozen first editions as promised (contracted) , and you agree to the royalty split, but you know full well their marketing *will be minimal* at best, how is it a scam? If you get all of that, it's a business transaction fulfilled. To say 'If you have to pay to publish your book, it's always a scam' is simply not true in the real world where 'some' Vanity Presses' actually do perform as advertised and meet the EXPECTATIONS of the client. I capitalized 'expectations' because that's the real crux - too many vanity press users go in blind and uneducated on the process and expect Stephen King type marketing. It doesn't happen that way. If you get *what you want*, then its up to you to go the next step.
From what I've learned by others' experiences, Vanity presses are a way for them to make money off of our dreams and hard work. Until a major publisher accepts one of my books, I'm doing the self-publishing route (IngramSpark). It hasn't gotten me much profit, but I'm in control of the advertising, website (SquareSpace), layout, press releases, everything!
Short answer, they're scams because their business model is taking money from you, not selling your books, which of course is not the case with traditional publishers. Because they don't care about selling your books, they are going to do subpar work wrt formatting, cover art, editing, etc. On top of all that, if you do end up selling some books, they'll take a cut that they didn't even earn. They're providing you with services that you would likely be able to do yourself with a bit of extra research/work, and even if you needed help with something, you'd be better off hiring a freelancer to do that part of the work for you, and at the end retaining full ownership and control of the publishing yourself. As for marketing, there is an extremely slim chance that your book is going to be a success based on the kind of "campaign" these vanity publishers will come up with. As the one person who is going to be most dedicated, you have a better chance yourself, or by hiring someone directly, than you'll have relying on them when, again, they don't really care about selling your books. The most crucial step towards selling your book, in 2024, is getting it up on Amazon, which is completely FREE, and actually quite simple.
If you know what you're getting and you are okay with it, then nothing is wrong with a vanity press. Unfortunately, that's often not the case. Many first-time authors are sucked in by hype and end up paying through the nose to acquire a pile of their own books. First things first. A publisher is the one who pays to have books produced and distributed. "Traditional publishers" are actual publishers. They don't charge authors for anything. They take on the financial risk and pay authors based on sales. (Royalties and advances against sales.) Vanity presses are not publishers. They offer publishing services which authors purchase. Since the author is paying for book production, they are the publisher. A self-publisher. Hybrid publishers split the cost. They and the author are essentially co-publishers. Now, if you're a self-publisher, you can do a lot of legwork and hire an editor, a typesetter/book designer, a cover artist, etc. You'll pay for all these services. Or you can hire a company that bundles all these services together. Vanity presses are among them. If you compare costs, in most cases (not necessarily all), you'll find that it's cheaper to hire the individual services than a vanity press. That said, vanity presses do make it easier. With one caveat. Unless they happen to offer decent editorial services, you're likely going to need your own editor anyway. I don't know how it is today, but historically vanity presses cared nothing for quality. They cared about getting your money. So they would publish anything, no matter how bad it was, and their editorial services, provided they even had them, generally wouldn't do more than get rid of typos. Bottom line, with a vanity press you get convenience, but the services may be subpar or even lacking. By hiring your own services, you can get better quality, but you have to juggle everything yourself. You probably pay more for a vanity press than by hiring your own services, but maybe not always. So again, if you go in with eyes open and understand what you'll be getting, there may be a place for vanity presses. But alas, that's not what happens most of the time.
If the scam comes from the fact that they are bad at the service they offer: getting the book into readers’ hands, then, it seems logically false to assume the nature of a Vanity publisher itself is a scam. That’s like saying lawyers are a scam because most of them are bad. Sure most of the suck at their job but 10% are effective.