Based on Wikipedia: Vanity press

In 2011, a thirteen-year-old girl from Anaheim, California paid a company called ARK Music Factory to produce a music video for her. The result was "Friday" by Rebecca Black, a song so widely mocked for its banal lyrics and auto-tuned vocals that it became one of the most viral videos of the year. Millions watched it specifically to ridicule it. Yet the company had delivered exactly what it promised: they took the money, made the video, and released it to the world.

This is the essence of the vanity press model, applied to music instead of books.

The term "vanity press" refers to a publishing company that charges authors money to print their books. Unlike traditional publishers, who pay authors for the right to publish their work, vanity presses reverse the transaction entirely. The author becomes the customer. The book becomes a product manufactured for that customer, regardless of whether anyone else will ever want to read it.

How Traditional Publishing Actually Works

To understand what makes vanity publishing different, you first need to understand how mainstream publishing operates.

When a traditional publisher acquires a book, they take on all the financial risk. They pay for editing, cover design, typesetting, printing, distribution, and marketing. They pay the author an advance against future royalties—sometimes a few thousand dollars, sometimes millions, depending on the book's commercial prospects. If the book flops and sells only a handful of copies, the publisher absorbs the loss. The author keeps the advance.

Because traditional publishers bear all this risk, they are extraordinarily selective. Most manuscripts submitted to major publishers are rejected. Estimates vary, but acceptance rates at major houses often hover around one to two percent. Getting published traditionally is genuinely difficult. The gatekeepers are rigorous because their money is on the line.

This creates a problem for writers who believe in their work but cannot get past those gates.

Enter the Vanity Press

Vanity presses exist because rejection hurts.

If traditional publishers won't take your book, a vanity press will—for a price. Pay the fee, and they'll print copies of your manuscript. They'll put a spine on it. They'll assign it an International Standard Book Number, that thirteen-digit code libraries and bookstores use to track inventory. Your book will technically exist as a published work.

The term "vanity press" is deliberately unflattering. It implies that the author is publishing not because the work has merit, but because their ego demands seeing their name on a book cover. The companies themselves never use this term. They prefer labels like "independent press" or "subsidy publisher." Authors who use such services often call themselves "indie authors," a phrase that carries far more cachet.

But the economics remain the same. The author pays. The company prints.

Yog's Law and the Flow of Money

Science fiction author James D. Macdonald coined a useful principle: "Money should always flow toward the author." This has come to be known as Yog's Law, after Macdonald's online pseudonym.

The principle is simple. In legitimate publishing, someone believes your writing has commercial value and pays you for it. If money flows the other direction—from author to publisher—something has gone wrong. Either you are paying for a service (which is fine, if you understand that's what you're doing) or you are being scammed.

Author John Scalzi proposed a corollary for self-publishing: "While in the process of self-publishing, money and rights are controlled by the writer." This distinction matters. A writer who hires an editor, pays a cover designer, and uploads their book to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing is self-publishing. They control everything. They keep all their rights. They can pull the book at any time, change the price, or move to a different platform.

A writer who signs a contract with a vanity press often surrenders some of these controls. The vanity press may claim certain rights, impose restrictions on where the book can be sold, or lock the author into unfavorable terms.

The Scam Spectrum

Not all vanity presses operate the same way. Some are straightforward print-on-demand services that deliver exactly what they promise: physical copies of your book, produced for a fee. Others engage in practices that venture into outright fraud.

One common deception works like this: A company advertises that it operates a traditional publishing division, one that pays authors and takes on commercial risk just like the major houses. An aspiring writer submits their manuscript. A few weeks later, they receive a response dripping with backhanded enthusiasm. The editorial committee loved your book, the letter explains, but it just barely missed the threshold for traditional publication. However—and here comes the hook—the company would be willing to publish it through their assisted publishing program, if only the author commits to purchasing a certain number of copies, or pays for their "professional editing service."

The exorbitant fee charged for these services conveniently covers the entire cost of producing the book. The company has shifted all financial risk to the author while giving the impression that the book almost qualified for traditional publication.

This exact scam appears as a plot point in Umberto Eco's novel "Foucault's Pendulum," published in 1988. The practice was old enough even then to serve as a recognizable literary device.

The Better Business Bureau in the United States has recorded numerous complaints about vanity presses offering costly, poor-quality services with limited recourse for dissatisfied customers.

The Hybrid Publishing Question

Between traditional publishing and vanity publishing lies a contested middle ground called hybrid publishing.

A true hybrid arrangement involves shared costs and shared risks. The publisher contributes editorial expertise, distribution networks, and marketing support. The author contributes money. Both parties have skin in the game. The publisher is selective because they're investing their resources, not just their time.

The problem is that many vanity presses have begun calling themselves hybrid publishers. It sounds more respectable. It obscures the fundamentally transactional nature of the arrangement.

The Society of Authors and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain—trade unions that together represent nearly fifteen thousand authors—have called for reform of the hybrid publishing sector. In a joint report, they documented widespread bad practices among companies that charge writers to publish while simultaneously stripping away their rights. The companies get paid regardless of whether the book sells. Authors often end up with boxes of books they cannot distribute, having signed away options that would have allowed them to pursue other paths.

Famous Authors and Self-Publishing Myths

You will sometimes hear that famous authors used vanity presses. Mark Twain! Jane Austen! The implication is that vanity publishing has a distinguished pedigree, that the literary establishment is simply too hidebound to recognize genius.

This confuses self-publishing with vanity publishing.

Mark Twain did indeed publish some of his own work. He founded his own publishing company, Charles L. Webster and Company, through which he released "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs, among other titles. But Twain wasn't paying someone else to print his books. He was running an actual publishing business, making editorial decisions, taking on financial risk, and distributing books to the market.

Jane Austen's first novel, "Sense and Sensibility," was published "by the author" in 1811. Her father put up the money. She took the risk. When the book sold well enough to turn a profit, that profit went to her. This is self-publishing in its purest form—the author as entrepreneur.

Neither of these writers sent money to a company that promised to make their dreams come true.

Vanity in Other Media

The vanity press model has migrated beyond books. Rebecca Black's "Friday" represents the music video variant. Pay a production company, get a video released. Whether anyone watches it—or whether they watch it for the right reasons—is not the company's concern.

Vanity photography magazines work similarly. Publications with names like "Lucy's," "Jute," and "Pump" accept photograph submissions, often for free or for a small fee. The real business model relies on photographers purchasing copies of the magazine after their work appears. Physical circulation is minimal because the readers are the contributors.

Perhaps the most striking example comes from academic publishing. So-called predatory journals charge researchers fees to publish their work, then provide little or no editorial oversight despite claiming peer review credentials. The International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology famously accepted for publication a paper consisting entirely of the sentence "Get me off your fucking mailing list" repeated hundreds of times. The submission was a test, designed to expose the journal's lack of quality control. The journal passed the test by failing it spectacularly.

A Brief History of a Very Old Scam

The term "vanity press" appeared in mainstream American publications at least as early as 1938, but the practice is older than the phrase.

The Abbey Press of New York operated from 1899 to 1903 under founder Charles Frederick Rideal. On February 7, 1903, a fire destroyed the company along with all its business records. The circumstances were suspicious enough to warrant the word "suspicious" in historical accounts.

In 1941, a man named C. M. Flumiani was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison for mail fraud. His scheme had promised authors book promotion (which turned out to be a single line in a catalog), expert editing (the company accepted every manuscript submitted), and representation by a literary agent (who conveniently brought all books to Flumiani's own publishing houses). The scam was old enough to prosecute, which means it was already well-established.

By 1956, the three largest American vanity presses—Vantage Press, Exposition Press, and Pageant Press—were each publishing more than one hundred titles per year. The industry had found its footing. Aspiring authors have always outnumbered available slots at traditional publishers. Vanity presses monetize that gap.

When Vanity Publishing Makes Sense

Not everyone who uses a vanity press is being scammed.

Ernest Vincent Wright wanted to publish a novel called "Gadsby" in 1939. The book had a peculiar feature: it was written entirely as a lipogram, meaning it avoided a particular letter throughout. In Wright's case, he wrote over fifty thousand words without once using the letter E, the most common letter in English. Traditional publishers weren't interested. Wright paid to have the book printed.

If your goal is to hold a physical copy of your book, give it to family members, or preserve your writing in printed form, a straightforward vanity press might serve that purpose. The danger lies in mistaking this service for something it isn't—a path to literary success, a validation of your talent, or a stepping stone to traditional publication.

A vanity press will print your book because you paid them to print it. Not because they believe in it. Not because they think it will sell. Not because they see you as the next great American novelist. They see you as a customer, and they are delivering a product.

The distinction matters less in the printing and more in the expectations. Go in clear-eyed about what you're buying, and you might get exactly what you want. Go in hoping for something more, and you're likely to be disappointed—or worse, exploited.

The Economics of Dreams

Rejection is painful. The desire to see your name on a book spine is powerful. These emotions have fueled an industry for more than a century.

What vanity presses sell, ultimately, is not books. It's the feeling of being published. The physical artifact. The ability to say "I wrote a book" and point to the evidence. For some authors, that feeling is worth the price. For others, the transaction leaves them poorer in both money and dignity.

The flow of money tells you everything. In traditional publishing, someone is betting their dollars on your talent. In vanity publishing, you are betting your dollars on yourself—and the house always wins.