Anatomy of a Book… The Road to Publication… LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP

Okay, so you’ve written a book. Okay, so you want the book published. So what do you do? In a recent blog post, I mentioned that authors need to be wary of offerings by “vanity” publishers, and “vanity” publishing “solutions” offered by “big” publishers.

There are different roads you can take… and all of them involve an investment of your time and emotion. Some of them involve an investment of your dollars. One of the options, where an author invests dollars, is not worth the dollars spent. Nor is it worth the emotional heartbreak of the dollars spent.

The Australian Society of Authors (the ASA) has classified book publishers in three broad categories: commercial publishers, self-publishers and vanity publishers. You can read the ASA’s full description of publishers here.

A commercial publisher – either a large commercial publisher or an independent publisher – is responsible for originating the production of a book and bears the cost or the financial risk in making a book available. Basically, they take on the financial risk of publication in order (hopefully) to retrieve their costs from sales of the published book.

With a commercial publisher, the money ALWAYS flows to the author. Large commercial publishers have larger budgets and can “offer” larger advances to authors than small independent publishers (like BDA Books), but the money always, ALWAYS, flows to the author, whether you get a deal from a small or large commercial publisher. I say “offer” in inverted commas (or typographer’s quotes for the typographer geeks) because the size of the advances for first time authors (and even mid–list authors) are not as large as they once were. It’s really only the big name, well established authors (authors who’ve been “in the game” for 15 or 20 years with dozens of books under their belts) or “reality celebrities” who get the “mega–millions” advances.

Self-publishers (more often than not called independent publishers these days) are authors, organisations or others who have decided to take on the role of the commercial publisher themselves and take on the costs of publication and take on all responsibility for marketing and distribution. I prefer the term independent publishing: indies take on all the roles that a larger commercial publisher takes on: editing, proofing, typesetting, cover design, printing and the rest… all on a much smaller budget.

A vanity publisher is one who takes money from someone else – usually the author – in order for a book to be published and this transfers the cost or financial risk from the publisher to the payee, i.e. the author.

Vanity publishers EXIST on the fees paid to it by authors. They charge for editing, cover design, ISBN allocation, printing, distribution. These fees are more often than not PHENOMINALLY higher than the going rate that an author could achieve if they decided to self publish. I mean charging like a wounded bull… The “cheapest” packages go as low as $1,000. You can’t get a decent proof read, let alone a cover design, formatting, and the rest, for that! The “best” packages cost in the order of $25,000. That’s right! $25,000! And authors often tend to lose out in terms of control – more often than not, the ISBN issued by a “vanity” publisher is in the “vanity” publisher’s name (meaning it cannot be used with a printer other than the printer chosen by the “vanity” publisher) and the authors are bound by unreasonable release terms for their work (meaning the author does not get their rights back for anywhere up to seven years).

With commercial publishing (if an author ever gets to know the cost that their commercial publisher spends) and self publishing, the costs of an editor, cover designer, printer, proof copies are not insignificant in the eyes of an author. But authors, books, and readers, get better books when a book is published when published by a major commercial publisher or an independent publisher. The author is, and their readers are, worse off going with a vanity publisher than they are if the author went with a commercial publisher or self published.

Vanity publishing is the one option where, in my view, it is not worth the effort, both in dollar value and in emotional value.