Waterton Publishing Company

[Scythian]

https://watertonbooks.com/
Looks like a stuffy, solid, up-and-coming venture at first glance, what with this and that being *released*, *events* taking place etc.

A friend contacts them, and it turns out that they're so badass, you have to pay them $1000 for the book cover, something like that again for the separate "interior design," and then later, if you swallow this, they'll discuss editing and, separately, proofreading. And other stuff as well, no doubt. I can well imagine them thinking up some totally fancy marketing thing, composed of a number of sub-things, each of which will cost $$$.

...Vanity publishers certainly have a valuable role to play in society, for example when someone wants to publish grandpa's letters from the war or "the gifted nephew's" poetry, and then distribute this among friends and relatives to mark some sort of occasion, but in situations in which this is all a)not uprfont and b) when sprung on one--presented as "that's how the publishing thing works, everybody's doing it"--then that's not OK. That's more in the predatory behavior field.

 

[zmethos]

Oh, no, uh-uh. And they sure don't advertise that on their site, do they?

I don't think vanity publishers have ANY value. If you want to publish grandpa's letters, you can do that yourself for far less cost, even if you use (reputable) author services. I see more and more vanity publishers masquerading as "author services" and the line seems to be blurring. But if you're paying a publisher for services AND they're going to slap their name/imprint on your book, that's vanity.

 

[writera]

I was going to create a thread about this place until I found this old one.

The company is still active and it did come up in a recent publisher search. Also, they (now?) claim they don't charge fees (at least not for publishing books). Their website seems to offer a variety of other services ("Design", "Media", magazine publishing etc.) that they do charge for:

Waterton Publishing Company offers quality book, magazine, and other media design services at reasonable prices.

Notice above it says they do charge for book publishing. However, from their "Publishing Inquiry" page (https://watertonbooks.com/publishing-inquiries/):

We do not charge authors for any of our services; we do not pay advances;
and the author royalty is 20% of net sales revenue (paid within ninety days from the date of sale). We accept book publishing submissions from authors and author representatives.

"We do not charge authors for any of our services." Yet every other page of their website but this one says they do charge. It's unclear/confusing, though I'm assuming it's only the book publishing they don't charge for (or at least claim not to charge for), but they charge for everything else? That seems to be the impression their website gives anyway.

I'm suspicious, though. Do they still charge fees and you only find out when you submitted, like the posts from 2018 above state? Did they stop charging fees? Did they add that disclaimer to their site after these reports back in 2018 or were they always there?

They only have six published books listed (and a few more on another page, but I'm not seeing more than 10 so far)...