John doppler head of alli s watchdog desk and author of choosing the best self publishing services for you identifies and rates the best and worst self publishing services here on this page alli watchdog ratings are based on careful appraisals of multiple criteria.
List of vanity publishing companies.
Entice the author into entering paid contests.
Deciding to self publish your book is both exciting and nerve wracking.
But unfortunately some new authors continue to fall for the same old traps.
Self publishing companies to avoid often do the following.
Self publishing companies to avoid.
Most vanity press publishers are operating on a predatory business model raking in business from misled authors who are sold on a dream to publish their book.
Upsell the author where possible.
Author solutions has a reputation.
Vanity publishing can be a misleading scam for today s aspiring authors.
You can publish a book with these companies with only a minimal investment in preparing your book.
Pricing and value quality of service contract terms and rights transparency accountability and customer satisfaction.
By far the most commonly mentioned vanity publisher is author solutions.
Once your book has been edited designed and you have a marketing plan in place you still have to figure out how you ll publish and distribute your work the number of options available is so large that it can be a bit overwhelming.
Self publishing and vanity publishing are different business models.
They draw them in rip them off and then kick them out with an incredibly bad book product that is priced outside of the competitive market.
These vanity publishers are in the business of selling overpriced services and packages and preying on naive and unsuspecting writers and authors.
Morgan james may be independent but it s also a vanity publisher.
It trades under a long list of names.
It requires its authors to commit to purchasing during the life of the agreement up to 2 500 copies of their book at.
Conflicts of interest some of these publishers are the vanity arm of or otherwise under common control with a fee charging literary agency which directs clients to the publisher under the guise of having made a sale often without revealing the financial and personnel links between the two businesses.
The following lists are of notable self publishing companies and some which provide assistance in self publishing books provide print on demand services as publishers operate as vanity presses or custom print merchandise and on products.
I ve written several times in this blog about morgan james publishing most recently in 2018 regarding its repeated inclusion on publisher s weekly s annual list of fast growing independent publishers.
Vanity publishers are disappearing.
And vanity presses are different from book packagers book shepherds or those.
Initially quiet about about marketing publicity creating an author website a vanity publisher will then try to charge authors extra fees for these services.