I hope to put this up on my website once it's done. It's still a work in progress, so if anyone has any advice or suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them. I've meant to write an article about PA for some time, but I wanted to back up my article with quotes from the PAMB to support everything I said. Needless to say, there were so many quotes that it took quite a while to go through all of them. Anyway, here's the article (written for people who might not know of PA, which is why it begins with a description of vanity presses). Again, all feedback is appreciated.
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The new face of vanity publishing
Vanity publishers offer writers a chance to see their books in print – for a price. This can be a sum of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, but with a vanity press, the money always flows in a green river from the writer to the publisher, with only the occasional sluggish trickle in the opposite direction. And since the publisher gets its money directly from the writers (as opposed to getting money from bookstores and readers), the publisher has no incentive to promote those writers’ books. That’s left up to the writers.
Many writers, though, realize that if a publisher requires payment before publishing a book, that implies that the publication is dependent on the writers’ financial resources, as opposed to their creative ones. In other words, it’s not that the publisher read their book and loved it, it’s just that the publisher is trading a service for money, and if the writers typed “I am a fish” three thousand times and paid enough, the publisher would put that effort into print as well. As a result, many writers know that they should not pay to be published.
That’s where PublishAmerica comes in. I wish I knew who first had the brainwave and developed the idea, but the cleverness of PublishAmerica is that they don’t ask for their money up front. That way, they foster the illusion of legitimacy, and on the PublishAmerica message board, authors reiterate that they didn’t pay to be published.
Unfortunately, this is like a company offering you a great free vacation where you only pay for the flight, the hotel, the meals and every pina colada you drink on the beach. The only difference between PA and AuthorHouse (another vanity publisher) is that PA doesn’t ask for its money upfront. And just as credit cards encourage excess spending by not making consumers feel that they’re losing money by handing over a piece of plastic, PA’s publish-now-pay-later strategy has worked for twenty thousand authors so far.
If all PA did was print people’s books and charge them for it later on down the line, without implying that it does anything else, that wouldn’t be unethical. But PA borrows some of the trappings of an actual publisher to deceive new authors and keep existing ones content, though under the white woolly exterior beats the wolflike heart of a vanity press. A great example of this are the advances that PA offers.
***********************************************
The new face of vanity publishing
Vanity publishers offer writers a chance to see their books in print – for a price. This can be a sum of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, but with a vanity press, the money always flows in a green river from the writer to the publisher, with only the occasional sluggish trickle in the opposite direction. And since the publisher gets its money directly from the writers (as opposed to getting money from bookstores and readers), the publisher has no incentive to promote those writers’ books. That’s left up to the writers.
Many writers, though, realize that if a publisher requires payment before publishing a book, that implies that the publication is dependent on the writers’ financial resources, as opposed to their creative ones. In other words, it’s not that the publisher read their book and loved it, it’s just that the publisher is trading a service for money, and if the writers typed “I am a fish” three thousand times and paid enough, the publisher would put that effort into print as well. As a result, many writers know that they should not pay to be published.
That’s where PublishAmerica comes in. I wish I knew who first had the brainwave and developed the idea, but the cleverness of PublishAmerica is that they don’t ask for their money up front. That way, they foster the illusion of legitimacy, and on the PublishAmerica message board, authors reiterate that they didn’t pay to be published.
The most frequent argument I always make in defense of PA is simple: I did not have to pay to have my books published. When I go to festivals or signings and run into someone who went the iUniverse or Author House route, they usually tell me what a positive experience it was, how great their contract is, yada, yada, yada. My comeback line is "Yes, but what did it cost you to see these miracles performed?"
Unfortunately, this is like a company offering you a great free vacation where you only pay for the flight, the hotel, the meals and every pina colada you drink on the beach. The only difference between PA and AuthorHouse (another vanity publisher) is that PA doesn’t ask for its money upfront. And just as credit cards encourage excess spending by not making consumers feel that they’re losing money by handing over a piece of plastic, PA’s publish-now-pay-later strategy has worked for twenty thousand authors so far.
If all PA did was print people’s books and charge them for it later on down the line, without implying that it does anything else, that wouldn’t be unethical. But PA borrows some of the trappings of an actual publisher to deceive new authors and keep existing ones content, though under the white woolly exterior beats the wolflike heart of a vanity press. A great example of this are the advances that PA offers.
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