A well-known author friend of mine got a letter the other day from the vanity press Airleaf Publishing regarding one of his older titles, which he republished for free a few years back through the Authors Guild’s Back-in-Print program at iUniverse. I’ve omitted the name of the book and the author:

For over four years, Airleaf Publishing & Book Selling Services has blazed a ground-breaking trail selling independantly published books directly to bookstores […] We recently discovered your book XYZ and we believe it has the potential to be a national bestseller. Your book comes highly recommended and is precisely the kind of book we have had the most success selling. That is why we extend to you thiis special invitation. We want to include XYZ in an unprecedented national publicity program. As part of this program, we will:
1. Place your book in 15 retail bookstores.
2. Assign a full-time telemarketer for daily calls to stores to sell your book and set-up signings.
3. Recommend your book in person to decision-makers at five regional bookstore chains.
4. Place your book with 24 others on our unique campaign website
5. Place your book on the homepage of our retail store bookselling website
6. Place your book for sale on amazon and periodically on ebay.
7. Produce a 30 second television commercial to 630,000 views, 240 times.
8. Include your book in a full color glossy newspaper insert delivered to 200,000 subscribers.
9. Include your book in an email campaign to 500,000 book club members.
10. Broadcast two ten minute interviews on national syndicated AM/FM radio shows.
Our goal is to put XYZ in bookstores nationwide and make X a household name. While we have spent thousands, your cost to participate is only $7000!

It’s astonishing to me that there are people who will fall for this. It’s obvious that Airleaf didn’t do any real research into the author…or they would have discovered that he’s already very successful and well-known, and that the book they think has great potential was original published in 1990, in paperback in 1991, and was nominated for the equivalent of the Academy Award for excellence in its genre. Clearly, they are just trawling through the lists of iUniverse, PublishAmerica, and Authorhouse titles looking for suckers who still have some credit left on their Visa cards.

Let’s analyze their "incredible" offer, shall we?

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The multi-talented Keith Snyder makes my favorite comment yet about PublishAmerica, Authorhouse,  and other vanity presses. Brace yourselves, because he tells it like it is:

THESE PEOPLE ARE OUT TO SCAM YOU. There is nothing about that
question that’s the least bit in question, except in the minds of the
ignorant and naive.

If you want to see your stuff printed and bound, and get (wow!) an
ISBN number and see it (wow!) on Amazon, that’s your business.

But Jesus Christ, you legion of suckers, open your goddamn eyes.
Whether vanity presses have a place in the Grand Scheme of Things or
not, they are parasitic entities that base their business models on the
assumption that talentless wannabes will not only empty their bank
accounts, but volunteer to become shills for other talentless wannabes.

[…]On the other hand, do you want to be published? LEARN TO ####ING WRITE!

[…]Vanity press suckers can scream all they want that they ARE
published, they ARE they ARE they ARE!!!, but that’s all it is: Lots of
screaming.

There’s an actual publishing industry. It’s as screwed up as any
other industry–and mores screwed up than some–but it’s not evil.
There is no conspiracy to keep newbies out.

He is so right. It may be painful to hear, but that’s the  cold, hard truth.

If you bring up the harsh realities about self-publishing and print-on-demand vanity presses, you’re inevitably going to get trashed by legions of aspiring writers who think that writing a check to Authorhouse makes them a published author.  Which is why I thought it was pretty gutsy of bestselling author Tess Gerritsen to offer her opinion on why vanity press books inevitably fail. She lays the blame primarily on lack of distribution to brick-and-mortar stores and the no-returns policy that most of these so-called publishers have. She says it doesn’t necessarily have to do with the quality of the books.

I agree with her — except on the quality issue.  I think she’s being nice.  From my conversations with booksellers, their decision not to stock self-published titles has just as much to do with the quality of the books (or lack thereof).  I’m talking both about the way they are written and the way they are printed and bound. The cold, hard, unpleasant truth is that there’s a good reason that most of these authors go to vanity presses…because their manuscripts are unsaleable, unreadable crap that no agent will represent and that no editor would ever publish. Vanity press titles usually look terrible, too, inside and out. On top of that, Tess points out that booksellers find self-published authors difficult to deal with.

I was reminded of this at a booksigning at a Barnes and Noble in New
Hampshire.  After the signing, the events coordinator thanked me for
being “so easy to work with — unlike some other authors.”

“But I would think that most authors are pretty nice,” I said.

“Most are,” she said.  “But the self-published ones are horrible.”
Then she described an incident that had happened earlier that week.  A
local self-published author had requested that the store arrange a
booksigning for him, and she had turned him down flat.  Enraged, he’d
thrown the book on the floor and asked: “When the hell am I ever going
to get a signing in this store?”

“When pigs fly,” she’d snapped at him.  The man couldn’t accept the
fact that their store almost never hosted signings by self-published
authors — even if the author was local.

I hear this a lot from my bookseller friends. The problem, they say, is that people buy the iUniverse hype — that writing a check makes them a published author — and are shocked when booksellers don’t agree.