Clarifying: Indie Publishers = Vanity/Self-Publish?

The word is used in both senses, confusingly.

G.Collins said:

. .. then what do you call authors who are looking to publish a novel with a small press in a niche market?. . . .

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"Writers."

--Ken

Strictly speaking:

Publishers which make most of their money by selling books to readers are trade publishers, also sometimes referred to as mainstream or commercial publishers.

Trade publishers tend to pay writers advances, edit, design, and typeset their books, employ a sales team to sell them into retail outlets and a marketing/promotion team to market and promote them. They dominate the markets, the review sections of most publications, and the bookshop shelves.

Publishers which make their money from the writers they publish are vanity publishers, regardless of whether that money comes in at the front end--through fees charged for editing, printing etc--or at the back end--by selling books to those authors.

Authors who set up their own publishing ventures, and (critically) who control all the aspects of publishing, are self-published.

There's now a crossover of those last two categories which makes things more confusing. Vanity publishers are now being called "self publishing service providers" and similar, which really muddies the water.

Big trade publishers are conglomerates, which are made up of lots of littler imprints, many of which used to be independent publishers before they were bought out by the conglomerates. Examples are Random House and Simon & Schuster.

Independent publishers are trade publishers which don't belong to any of the big conglomerates. They are, you guessed it, independent publishers because they operate independently. Canongate, which is based in Scotland, is an excellent example of an independent press.

An "indie writer", however, is a confusion. The term "indie" has been half-inched by self-publishers who either didn't know or don't care that "independent" was already in use. It's a fancy-for-the-sake-of-it term for self-publisher, much as "traditional", "legacy", and (ew) "dead tree" are all fancy-for-the-sake-of-it terms for trade publishing.

Old Hack said:

...
Publishers which make their money from the writers they publish are vanity publishers, regardless of whether that money comes in at the front end--through fees charged for editing, printing etc--or at the back end--by selling books to those authors.

Authors who set up their own publishing ventures, and (critically) who control all the aspects of publishing, are self-published.

There's now a crossover of those last two categories which makes things more confusing. Vanity publishers are now being called "self publishing service providers" and similar, which really muddies the water.

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I don't know if it's that there's crossover so much as the vanity publishers spend lots of their marketing efforts intentionally trying to confuse the issue, saying "We'll help you get your self-publshed book published" or <ack> "We pay our authors just like Traditional Publishers do."

Check out ResearchGuy's posts, and especially check out this thing he wrote (URL swiped from his sig):
http://www.umbachconsulting.com/pursuit.pdf
He has separate chapters on "Self Publishing" (Chapter 4) and "Subsidy and Vanity Publishing" (Chapter 5) with good reason, as you'll see when you read it.

ETA: Now having read this thread over Very Carefully, I see ResearchGuy has posted in this very thread.

Ben, I thought very carefully before I wrote "crossover": I agree that plenty of vanity publishers are marketing themselves as self-publishing services; but there are also plenty of authors who use their services and consider themselves self-pubilshed, and I was trying to do that RYFW thing.

And yes, ResearchGuy's PDF is well worth reading.