skylarburris
Re: everything printed must be true
Self-publication, however, requires a much larger time commitment and expenditure, and that is the trade-off. I did not want to purchase a block of ISBNS (which alone costs almost as much as vanity publishing with a POD), warehouse my books, get them listed with online retailers, fulfill each order myself, etc. I can't imagine having to address and mail out hundreds of books already...I'm glad that is taken care of for me. Once my book was in the publisher's hands, other than self-promotion, I had nothing to do, and I could concentrate on writing instead. If I had self-published, my initial cash outlay would have been six times as much. My profits would have been higher, however, and so I would have eventually broken even and perhaps profited more in the long run. But that extra money just wasn't worth the extra trouble and extra risk.
I have noticed that while using a "vanity" POD is much disparaged on these boards, self-publishing is not. In both cases, an author is paying to publish. What is the essential difference, then, in the virtue and honor of the two enterprises? (I'm not asking a technical question here, but rather why a self-published author may be regarded as respectable and a vanity published author as unrespectable.)
Self-publication, however, requires a much larger time commitment and expenditure, and that is the trade-off. I did not want to purchase a block of ISBNS (which alone costs almost as much as vanity publishing with a POD), warehouse my books, get them listed with online retailers, fulfill each order myself, etc. I can't imagine having to address and mail out hundreds of books already...I'm glad that is taken care of for me. Once my book was in the publisher's hands, other than self-promotion, I had nothing to do, and I could concentrate on writing instead. If I had self-published, my initial cash outlay would have been six times as much. My profits would have been higher, however, and so I would have eventually broken even and perhaps profited more in the long run. But that extra money just wasn't worth the extra trouble and extra risk.
I have noticed that while using a "vanity" POD is much disparaged on these boards, self-publishing is not. In both cases, an author is paying to publish. What is the essential difference, then, in the virtue and honor of the two enterprises? (I'm not asking a technical question here, but rather why a self-published author may be regarded as respectable and a vanity published author as unrespectable.)