Well, atleast it wasn't Author House I was considering to publish with. The guy over the phone blatantly told me they'd charge $680 upfront or something to that extent to.... well, I forgot what else he said. Something about them being a POD.
He explained how that was a better decision than actually having me be forced to buy 10,000 copies of my own work and store them like other publishers do. WHAT?
A bit of sorting out, if I may. First off, he meant other VANITY publishers.
Author House, iUniverse, and various others are subsidy publishers. They charge for services, such as manuscript formatting, possibly editing (usually an optional extra), cover design (can be an optional extra), book design, and so on. Those are all tasks that
someone has to do to produce a book. Commercial publishers do those things as part of the publishing process, incurring a lot of costs in the process (not to mention the costs of printing thousands of copies of the book, typically 3,000 to 5,000 copies in a first printing, and more for books with better anticipated sales). That is why commercial publishers HAVE to be selective about what they publish and can be picky about the authors they will publish.
Subsidy publishers take payments from authors for those services.
Self-publishers either hire people (editors, book designers, graphic artists, and so on) to provide those services, or do those things themselves. Smart, professional self-publishers (those that are morphing into small presses) do pay for those services. There ain't no free lunch. Editing, for example, can easily cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on what kind of editing, type of manuscript, and length. No author is his or her own best editor/copy editor/proof reader, and very few have manuscript formatting/book design skills. Certainly few have those skills at a level that will result in a professional-looking book.
Old-line vanity publishers (Vantage and Dorrance being the best known) charge tens of thousands of dollars for the illusion of publishing, and engage in some pretty snarky and exploitive practices. This is a long story and I am not going to take the time here to explain, except to note that they do produce a print run as part of the process--but retain ownership of the products (the author ends up paying twice). They are even worse, by far, than such subsidy publishers as iUniverse or AuthorHouse.
I do not think the word "blatant" really fits for what the Author House fellow told you. They sell a service. Either the customer wants to buy it or not. Outlining the charges is no more "blatant" than the plumber who says that repairing or updating your bathroom plumbing is going to cost X hundred or Y thousand dollars. Fee for service. You sell goods or services, you set a price.
For whatever it is worth, to change directions for a second, I am inclined to define "vanity publisher" as a publisher that the author pays for the act of publishing
but that seeks to convince the author that it is a legitimate, selective, commercial publisher. Forthright subsidy publishers do not make that pretense, while still publishing at the author's expense. In my view, it is the deception--the flagrant appeal to the author's vanity and gullibility--that makes a vanity publisher.
All FWIW IMHO YMMV.
--Ken
