You've heard about them in grumbles and whispers. You’ve seen them mocked on Making Light. You may have even submitted to them, knowingly or not. But how do you know if the company you've handed your lovingly-crafted novel to is a legitimate publisher or a bottom-feeding vanity press? Doctor Merlin can help.
The first question you may be asking yourself is why this is relevant in a column dedicated to all things fannish. Fan writers are not pro writers (except of course when they are). Fanfiction has different requirements and expectations than professional fiction (please see "You Mean Everybody Brought Potato Salad?") but while many fan writers are happy to be fan writers, scratch the surface and you'll often find someone who's learning to write in hopes of making it to the big leagues. Even fans who are perfectly happy writing fanfiction daydream about getting to do this all day and getting paid for it. Who wouldn't? But there are things to know and things to consider, and writers need to be careful where they send their work.
The easiest way to recognize a vanity press is to check which way the money flows. If you are giving someone else your money to publish your work, you are dealing with a vanity press. You might be asked to purchase a copy of an anthology to "guarantee" a place for your story or poem. You may be asked to put money up front to help offset the publication costs of your new novel (with muted promises of making it back later in royalties). You may even be told outright that you're paying for publication and have to purchase a minimum number of copies of the book to sell on your own. In each case, the money is flowing in the wrong direction, from the author to the publisher. A real publisher pays you for your work, and then recoups the costs of buying publication rights – as well as the costs of publication and marketing – by selling copies of the book.
The money issue is a big deal. Writing is work. As fans, we’re used to writing for the love of our subjects, and so ponying up a little cash for the opportunity to make it big ("realize your dreams" is a popular mantra) may seem a little excessive but not outright awful. However, when you are creating something, and you take that idea to the marketplace, you should be paid for your work, not the other way around. The WGA strike, which has halted production on so many of our shows, is at its core an argument between writers who want fair market value for their work, and producers who claim the writers should do it for free. The writers know that work gets paid. If you intend to write for a living, you should get paid for your work, period.
The money flow issue represents a difference of philosophies between vanity presses and legitimate publishers. Real publishers consider your work the product, and bookstores and readers are the customers. Marketing is geared towards selling the product, and the editorial process is geared toward making that product as well-made and attractive to the consumer as possible. Vanity publishers see the author as the customer, and the author's work as a free product to be marketed back to the author him or herself. (Shorter: the vanity press is selling you back your own work.) Extra sales are a bonus, but aren't the bread and butter of the industry.
The marketing structure is another giveaway. Real publishers will try to market your book, sending out copies for review, contacting bookstores to carry it, and setting up appearances and signings. Vanity publishers expect you to market yourself. Your book may be available for order from online retailers and other stores, but you won't see copies on the shelves at B&N or your local Mom n' Pop bookstore (unless you talked them into it yourself). You won't get many people that you don't already know, or meet at the signings you set up yourself, looking at your book. Getting people to see your book is the key to making sales. If you've got a large enough group of friends and admirers, you might make up the initial outlay you've paid to a vanity press, but you still won't be making new sales unless you get your book to be seen by a lot more people.
Speaking of people, another thing to watch out for is that vanity press publishers are very nice and have fantastic people skills. This is not to say the folks who work for more traditional publishing houses are not nice, nor do I claim they lack people skills. However, vanity publishers are going to go out of their way to be your best friend and biggest fan. You're giving them money, and they want to stay on your good side, just like the salesperson at the car dealership. Ask around, and you'll hear time and again how positive the folks are at vanity presses, and how kind. Great people, salt of the earth, so glad to get that personal touch from someone in the industry.
Professionals in the publishing business are not going to go out of their way to be your best friend. (Caveat: not as pros. You might have plenty of friends in the publishing business on your own.) A friend of mine works at a major publishing house, and occasionally mentions the slush pile. It's enormous: piles of manuscripts from first-time authors, many of them unreadable, others decent enough if uninspiring, and a very few gems buried with the rest. The publisher's job is to find the gems, polish them, and sell them to a large number of people. If the books sell and continue to sell, then the publisher will start treating you special. Not before. If you're not a big name, they're going to be selling your books on the strength of the story, and they may or may not be accommodating as you both get the novel into publishable form.
That brings us to the editing process. Ah, you nod your head. You've edited your own work thoroughly. As fan writers, we've all seen the full range, from the incomprehensible story tossed off during math class, to the multi-betaed masterpiece that took ten years to complete. (We've also all beaten our heads against the wall when the former gets more feedback than the latter, but that's life.) If you're sending off your work to a publisher, your first stop is with a set of beta readers, just like with fanfic. Get a group of people, and make sure that at least half of them are better writers than you are. If the other half are English teachers, so much the better. You want people who will be honest with you about what works and what doesn't, which plotlines to emphasize and which to drop. Then you need to revise, and submit it again, either to the same group or even more friends, and again if necessary. Make certain that the draft you send to the publisher is the absolute best piece of work you are capable of producing. The professional publishers aren't going to read more than a page if you've misspelled words and break basic grammar rules, because they know they'll have to spend time and money getting it fixed. As it is, they will probably ask you for revisions, two or three times easily. If the professional publisher is buying your book, they're damned sure going to make certain it's a worthy investment. Vanity publishers will not care about how well your story is edited. If you're lucky, they’ll run it through spellcheck once. More often, you'll get glowing praises on the text (along with the request for payment) and whatever errors you let slip through show up in the finished product.
A side note about the short story market: things are going to be different, depending on where you submit. Some places that accept short stories will edit your work prior to publication (with permission) while others will post it exactly as written. This could be in a magazine, online, or for an anthology. You may or may not get paid, based on the overhead involved. Some people are happy to get published whether or not they get paid, because sometimes it's better to have your name published for free than not at all. However the same basic rule applies: if you're paying someone else to publish your work, even just agreeing to buy a copy of the magazine before the work is accepted, then you're dealing with a vanity press. (Along those same lines, Firefox News is proud to announce that we are now accepting short stories for paid publication. Please see our announcement.)
If you know going in that you're using a vanity publisher, it's not necessarily a bad thing. You get your work printed, and if you're willing to do the legwork to get it marketed, you can get your name out there. One of my favorite writers has been publishing her work via vanity press for ten years now. She goes to conventions whenever she can, she meets people and networks, and she continues to submit her new stuff to the big publishing houses, as well as paid short story markets. She knows the novels she's published so far won't ever pay her bills, but she also knows that when she finally makes that big sale, she's going to have an impressive back catalog ready for her fans. The vanity press has allowed her to keep writing in the meantime.
For people who just want to see their name on the cover of a book, Lulu seems to be the fan favorite. Just like Café Press, what you write is what you've got, as long as you're willing to buy it back. You can even buy it off Amazon, but be careful about copyright issues; fan writers have been caught by The Powers That Be for trying to publish their fanfic. (The rule in fandom is always: "Do not try to make money from fanfiction." Remember that. It's important.)
If you've been unknowingly snared by a vanity publisher, don't feel bad. They're very good at convincing people to part with their money. Once upon a time, even Doctor Merlin sent in money to publish some of her angsty (*grouchy old fan voice* when I was a teen, we didn't have "emo") poetry for an anthology; the book never arrived. As the poems were terrible, this was for the best, and it served up an important lesson on watching out for shady publishers.
The nice thing about fanfiction (and yes, this is where I'll end my little rant for now) is that fanfic archives don't charge, fanzines give free contributor copies, and no one cares how long your stories are, from six words to six hundred thousand, as long as you let us know in advance. Fanfic has room for drabbles (which we'll be discussing later) and many-chaptered WIPs and brief little one-line AUs and series and chain stories and everything under the sun. Professional printed markets are a much harder sell, wanting specific lengths for consideration, no matter what the natural length of the story might be. Professional online publishers are springing up every day, and may represent a shift from what used to be standard to what we do in fanfic every day.
It's a great time to dip your toes in the water. Just watch out for sharks.
(For more information, we highly suggest you check out Absolute Write http://www.absolutewrite.com , especially How Real Publishing Works, Publish America, and the Index to Agents, Publishers, and Others.)