We have been doing research and were getting confused on the differences of vanity presses, traditional publishers, self publishers do you need an agent or not.
We would like to know if you can send a manuscript to a publisher or is an agent a must? What is the thought?
Without overloading you with tons of detail, I'll cover the highlights.
Vanity press (VP): You pay them money, they print your book. It's up to the author to market the book and get it into bookstores. This is not a good option for fiction, and is better for very specialized nonfiction and/or poetry. Vanity presses can cost from hundreds to many thousands of dollars. Some will edit the manuscript, some will not. Many bookstores will not stock VP titles. Their goal is to sell books to the author, not the public.
Self publishing: (You didn't ask, but it should be mentioned). Similar to VP only the author does EVERYTHING: writes, edits, designs the book, formats it to look like a book, has a local printing press print the book. Author must market book and get bookstores to stock it. Many self published titles have become moderately to extremely successful.
Commercial publishing: (What you called "traditional publishing," which technically is not a real term. We prefer "commercial.") These are publishers whose books you see all over the bookstores. Their goal is to sell books to the general public. They pay advances to the author and their books will get stocked in bookstores everywhere. Where a VP author might sell a few hundred, a commercially-published author will sell thousands to hundreds of thousands. Best example: JK Rowling.
Regarding an agent, it depends on what kind of book you have. If it's commercial fiction, an agent is a must if you want a large publishing house to consider it. Many big houses will not look at unagented material. Without an agent, an author can to submit to large houses that do accept unagented material, but it will end up in the "slush pile" mixed in with good and bad submissions. A beginning author might try one of the many thousands of smaller houses that will look at unagented material.
There's a whole lot more to this than what I outlined. I urge you to check out some of the other forums on this board, including Writing Novels and Bewares and Background Checks. You'll find all the research you need scattered here and all over the boards.
Hope this helps,
allen (whose fourth books is a children's book in progress)
