This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Vanity Publishing: From YKTTW
Gracie Lizzie: Incidentally, $12 for a book is not that expensive. In fact by British standards it's around the same (a little less in fact, about 6.10GBP) than the RRP of most books over here (6.99 these days). And yes I'm just moaning about something only vaguely related to this article.
Erica MZDM: The ~$12 is just the production cost for a Po D book, at least from Lulu.com. Profit has to go on top of that.
[Edit: Actual base prices from www.lulu.com for a few different book sizes] 100 pages: $6.53 , 200 pages: $8.53 , 300 pages(what I used above): $10.53 [/edit]
Admittedly it's not my field of expertise, but I've heard that some vanity publishing operations work by purposefully inflating the authors ego. ie, instead of saying "Give us a PDF, and well print out yea many books for so much money." they say that they're /really/ very selective, that your manuscript is the best they've seen all year, we have a crack team of editors and designers that will make your book look teh awesome...
And Just for the record, I'm leery of mixing up the Po D technology with the Vanity Press buisness model. Yeas, the former is often used by the latter, but they're not the same thing.
Gracie Lizzie: Ooooh! I didn't get that.
Red Shoe: Incidentally, one thing I recall from my class on the ethics of copyright is this: In Great Brittain, where there are certain specific legal ramifications of being considered an "author", self-publishing doesn't count. The fact that you got something in print from Lulu doesn't let you go around calling yourself a published author.
- Gattsuru : If Britain follows the Rome accords, anything written down on paper or electronically is considered copyrighted, instantly. It really doesn't matter if it comes from a major press or from your computer's printer. Having used vanity presses or similar services and tried to sell the result through stores a major red mark on your record if you try submitting to a big royalty-based publisher, though, so you really shouldn't advertise it.
Erica MZDM: removed
- Bandai Visual has been known to treat its anime licenses in this manner. They put out DVDs with one or two episodes each at the same price as a regular one (or higher!), make them only available on the online store, and grab mostly either old series like Gunbuster or bad series like Galaxy Angel Rune. When True Tears was licensed by them in 2008, many normally upstanding people that buy everything they download and liked the series stated that because of this, they wouldn't buy it.
This has nothing to do with vanity publishing; it's just plain old price gouging, and possibly some Long Tail exploitation.
[edit]And major edits to the description, which hopefully no one will shoot me for. Removed mention of Po D, and emphasized that vanity presses are about the author's ego, not producing books. Tried to cut down on the repetitiveness of "most vanity-press produced works are horrible".
Paireon: What's really funny is that the ads on the page seem to be for vanity publishers...
Radhreni: Calling into question the following edit:
- My Immortal was published by Lulu.com, a (fairly reputable) vanity publishing site.
As far as I know Lulu is a print-on-demand service, not a vanity publisher. See earlier discussion edit (not mine) above about mixing POD and VP.
Radhreni: ...And since no one objects to my objection (or flat out doesn't care) and it's been a month or so now, I'm yanking the example. It's preserved in the above comment.
