Discussion Main / VanityPublishing

Agreed. The times, they are a-changing.

Feel free to start such a page in YKTTW.

Well, I removed the following for being self-published — it's perfectly clear they shouldn't be here so I think it was all right for me to remove so many:

(The whole section) Comic Books

• A Distant Soil, but for a different reason - it was originally published by Richard Pini of ElfQuest. However, author Coleen Doran severed the contract after nine issues because of the Executive Meddling. (Wherein dialogue, art, and cover changes were made without her approval, and she even stated in one of her memos that they even wanted to take her off the project. Pini has allegedly also tried to get the rights to it, too.)
• In one of the craziest examples, in 2008, Oklahoma County Commissioner Brent Rinehart created a bizarre 16-page comic detailing his vehement opposition to homosexuality and painting his opponents as being inspired by Satan, and then distributed copies to his constituents in an attempt to convince them to re-elect him. He ended up losing the primary and facing felony charges relating to his 2004 campaign.

• The infamous The Legend of Rah and the Muggles was self-published by author Nancy K. Stouffer in the 1980s. It was later republished by a company that was formed just to publish it 2001 in light of Stouffer's (since failed, miserably) attempt to sue J. K. Rowling. This plot breakdown should show you why. A small-time publisher tried to cash in on the No Such Thing as Bad Publicity and did a small print run, but it folded the next year.
• The first few books of The Cross Time Engineer series were published by Baen Books, but the later novels are entirely self published.
• E. Lynn Harris self-published his first book, and by tireless promotional touring sold a lot of copies and got it picked up by a regular publisher. Many of his subsequent books have been bestsellers.
• Another example of a previously self-published work picked up by a legitimate publisher: Gollancz has paid a six-figure sum to acquire the Stonewylde series by Kit Berry.
• Orbit has bought the rights to the previously self-published six book series The Riyria Revelations by Michael J. Sullivan and will re-release it as a trilogy.
• A borderline example happened with Carlos Cuauhtémoc Sánchez's works like Youth in Sexual Ecstasy and The Eyes of My Princess. These books are universally held in Mexico as prime examples of literary garbage that no self-respecting publisher would dare touch... except for Ediciones Diamante, which is Carlos's own publishing company!

These ones I removed because they're pretty clearly saying the work must be vanity publishing because it sucks or some such reason (while, of course, saying nothing about vanity publishers).

• Harry Potter's Muggle's Guide to Magic must fall under this category. There's no other way to describe this "dictionary" of the Harry Potter books that was published well before the series concluded. It's rife with misspellings ("wizardu books"? Really?) and inaccuracies — apparently Draco Malfoy's father is named "Dracus" (not "Lucius"), Dumbledore's first name is "Albert", and the Weasleys' car was a Flying Ford Angelica. The writing is also incomprehensible and manages to confuse the plots of the second and third books in the series. The art is just as bad: Hermione wearing glasses is a mild oversight, but making Hagrid into a four-foot-tall lumberjack and giving Mad-Eye Moody green skin is much less forgivable. At least we may all take comfort in the fact that the book is out of print.
• Lundon's Bridge and the Three Keys, published in 2011, is a children's fantasy novel intended as the first in a franchise of five books and their film adaptations, suggesting vanity filmmaking as well as publishing. It came to public attention only when Paris Jackson (Michael's daughter) was announced as playing the lead in the movie — she even appears on the cover — and the book is only available through the official website and Amazon.com. It's a loopy one: When her husband and daughter are seemingly killed by "The Decayed Sea" (Water Is Air is badly abused in this book), the jellyfish queen of the ocean kidnaps a human scientist, using his form to assume a human shape and turn kidnapped children into a half-human, half-insect army to destroy humanity for its pollution. Her plan hinges on destroying the belief in the heart of the scientist's 16-year-old daughter Lundon, who ultimately must save the day with help (a lot of help) from a dolphin that can turn into a human, a shapeshifting and fire-breathing seahorse, and a surfer friend who gets turned into a dragonfly. Supposedly this was in the planning stages for thirty-plus years; the movie is currently in Development Hell.
• The nonsensical plot and complete lack of understanding of biology present in Victoria Foyt's Save the Pearls might have gone unnoticed entirely, but for the fact that the book gathered extremely negative attention for its clumsy and insensitive handling of the Persecution Flip that serves as its main premise: a dystopian future where minority whites are discriminated against by a black majority, because higher melanin counts were less likely to get skin cancer when the Earth was bombarded with increased UV radiation. In the book it's a plot point that "Pearls" (whites) cover themselves in dark makeup to fit in... meaning blackface. The book also had several promotional videos done, with actors in blackface. With the author point-blank refusing to acknowledge there being anything remotely problematic about this, deleting all negative criticism of the topic on her Facebook page, and having apparently fabricated the majority of her own book reviews, it went from unheard of to infamous almost overnight, generally turning into Bile Fascination as the depths of the novel's ignorance and insensitivity were more fully explored.

There are still many others that don't mention vanity publishers but might be published by them (but probably aren't).

Also removed this:

• Maradonia Saga: Once upon a time, a girl named Gloria Tesch wrote a woefully generic young adult fantasy novel about a Gary-Stu and Mary-Sue who discover a magical land adjacent to the US, à la Narnia, fulfill a prophecy, turn out to be Chosen Ones, and fight against an "Evil Empire" (yes, that is what it is called; in spite of the fact that a reading of the first chapter reveals that isn't actually an empire anyway). Random words being italicized or in quotation marks for no fucking reason does not help. Her parents told her it was brilliant, published it, and the girl has since developed an ego the size of a planet; proclaiming herself the world's youngest published author (which she isn't), dismissing the most meager negative criticism as the work of "haters", and is under the impression that a Maradonia movie and amusement park are on the way. Amazon.com and other such websites are full of reviews written by the girl, her parents and her friends in which they relentlessly praise the series. Her books and self-promotional tactics have been analyzed in detail.

So it was published by her parents, not a vanity publisher.

I thought so too, and just went ahead and put them in one.