Article - Dangers of Vanity Publishers

A Vanity Press will simply print whatever you give them, and normally charge you rather a lot of money (normally in the £1,000s) for the priviledge. Whereas a good POD publisher will at least offer some services, and will generally be a lot less outlay. POD publishing has taken off in a massive way over the last few years, and this is due to the low cost of computer printing. The result of this is that there are now many of these companies to choose from, and some of the old Vanity Publishers have turned into POD ones.

As a general rule of thumb, if there is any sort of promise to do a print run, and the publisher asks for money up front, then it's a good bet that it's a Vanity Publisher. With the advent of POD, there is no need to outlay large sums of money to get your work published. Most POD companies ask for a few hundred up front to cover the cost of printing your book, but this normally includes some services. What these services are depend on how much they ask. See my article on POD and Options for an explanation of some of these services.

Coversely, a traditional publisher will never ask for money up front, indeed they will offer you a royaly amount based on what they think they will sell. Differentiating between Vanity and POD publishing is a little more difficult, as often they will both ask for money up front. When it comes down to it, it's your choice. What is it worth to you to get your book published and available. In the end, apart from traditional publishing, it's up to you to get your book noticed, and that means marketing. Whether you pay £100, or £1,000, your book is not going to sell unless you put an awful lot of work into getting it noticed. An extremely useful site for checking up on publishers, is Preditors & Editors. This site relies on the feedback of authors to review each company.