Amberley Publishing

I'm not interesting in submitting to them, but someone indirectly wanted to know if they were legit because he wanted to know if a book Amberly put out was any good. It was suggested that Amberly is a vanity press.

http://www.amberley-books.com/

Their website leaves a little to be desired--I think that they are working on it and that there are a few wild links. The site has changed over the past few days. Otherwise they look legit to me.

We welcome unsolicited book ideas in the subject areas covered by Amberley.

Click to expand...

All their books are UK history, but they do have claim to have a Spanish branch in Madrid. (Link is broken)

http://www.edicionesamberley.com/

I don't know anything about The History Press. No, the background is that someone was suggesting that they were a vanity press and that this was evidenced by the book cover. The book in question is here, but you might not want to click through and look at the cover--it's a police photo of a badly mutilated victim of Jack the Ripper.

The photo is from 1888 and hence in the public domain, but other than that it's a poor choice for a book cover. You'd have to cover it with brown paper if you wanted to read it on the bus, and it's not clear how this particular photo is relevant to the book's thesis, which is that the Ripper killings were actually unrelated murders that were tied together by reporters. The book is apparently not out yet, Amazon.com says it's out of print, Amazon.uk says the book is temporarily out of stock, and no one seems to have a firm publication date.

Anyhow, given the tendency of vanity publishers to search public domain photo databases for words in the book title and grab whatever comes up, someone suggested that this might be a vanity publisher and hence the book can be assumed not to be good enough to be handled by a real publisher.

There are numerous self-published and vanity published Ripper books, though, and the quality is often low. Heck, there are numerous commercially published best-selling Ripper books that are of questionable quality.

But I'm not aware of any other Ripper books that have that image on the cover. Besides being extremely icky, the only reason it's known to the public at all is that someone stole some prints from the police files way back when. So Amberley is asking for trouble by putting it on the cover. People think that there should be a sort of imaginary copyright imposed on it because it was obtained illegally, even though public domain still applies to the stolen image. Who knows, maybe they wanted the controversy.