The “Self Publishing Company”

Aug 6, 2012 by Lona

There was a time when no ghost or editor in their right mind would tell you use a vanity press. But the world, she is a-changin’.

Originally called vanity press, then subsidy press, and now “self publishing companies”, they’re all still the same: you pay them money, they publish your book. This is in stark contrast to a traditional publisher like Penuin or Harper-Collins, who pays you for the rights to publish your book. Many, many people have been scammed by vanity presses over the years, and yet these days, some people actually have good experiences.

This is not a topic I’ll really be able to cover in a single article. So here’s the basics.

If you self publish in the traditional way, you find a printer, you find a binder, you buy an ISBN, get an LCN and all those other numbers and serials and rights (and don’t forget the barcode) so that your book can go into libraries and be sold in bookstores, next to the professionally published books you’re competing with.

If you use a self publishing company, you are paying someone else to do all of that. And in some cases, that will work out just fine. But in most, it won’t.

See, you can’t put your book in bookstores if you’ve used a self publishing company because you’re not the publisher of record. Whoever owns that ISBN is the publisher, and they can pretty much do whatever they want with it. So unless you’re using a traditional publisher who’s accepted your book, published it and sent you an advance, you’re taking a crap-shoot that you’ll even be in the local B&N or Books A Million at all. You’ll be on Amazon, because Amazon lists every book, no matter what. But that doesn’t really help you get sold.

If you’re just planning to sell the book at the back of the room when you go out and speak, or just going to hand them out to family and friends, or sell them in your own storefront, etc, then a self publishing company should work fine – just make sure you read that contract very carefully and don’t expect them to do any promotion whatsoever.

But if you’re looking to publish your book globally and want it out there next to all the others, you either need a seriously vicious publicity plan, a good printer and a professional book designer (or a Book Shepard might come in handy – most ghostwriters double as one anyway), or you need a proposal/query letter and a good agent so you can get traditionally published.

As I said, this is a complex topic, and I’ll likely touch on it again in the future, but these are the basics.

Above all, I highly, highly, highly suggest that if you have a work of fiction, you get that traditionally published. A self publishing company is death for the standard novel.