Is Self-Publishing Vanity Publishing? “Vanity Publisher!” Someone on LinkedIn rebuked me for reaching out to let them know about our services helping people publish books. She called us a vanity publisher and meant it as an insult.

Vanity Publisher - someone who provides publishing services for a fee.

But why is it called a vanity publisher? Plumbers provide services for a fee. Should we call them vanity plumbers?

Vanity lawn care

Vanity hair cutting

Vanity doctors

Vanity dentists

Vanity pest control

Why publishers?

Is the assumption that someone who wants to publish a book but can’t get one of the “real” publishers, the traditional gatekeepers, to publish it, is vain if they still want to?

I call bull…

Where did this term come from?

I can only trace it to a 1937 New Yorker article about a man named Henry Harrison who got paid by authors to publish their books. The article used the term as though it had already been around awhile. It was not a compliment.

Now, it’s true that there are some bad actors out there. There are those who run scams. There are those who can barely be called publishers, producing anything for a fee without any discernment or editing, and Amazon is full of them.

But I personally know of several great self-publishing companies. They meet authors, discern the quality of the message, and help the authors produce the best quality book that they can, so that they can get their message or story out.

And they charge for that service.

The question is not should a publishing company charge to publish a book. The question is what kind of service are they providing for the price?

Most that I know of are up front about the fact that they don’t do editing. Their packages require the manuscript to be edited before they get it. The author hires an editor separately, or doesn’t edit it at all.

I don’t think this is a good idea, but it is not a scam.

At Indie Christian Book, we charge for the services involved in publishing and selling books. We do every round of editing for our clients for around the same price that a lot of companies publish without editing. We love books, we love the messages of our Christian clients, and we don’t want to produce a book that is not amazing. That’s our model.

Sometimes we also make royalties in exchange for either a lower up front fee, or an agreement for us to market the book. I am especially likely to do that on a book we ghostwrote through ChrisitanGhostwriting.com. We work all these agreements out up front, and we don’t use sales tactics to get agreements. We have plenty of clients because of one thing:

The gatekeepers have turned them away.

Why?

Not because the author does not have a great message or a powerful story. But because they have no audience. The agents and publishers have to take a risk when they pay an advance or even if they put in the overhead and don’t pay an advance. They aren’t going to make any money if the book doesn’t sell. They know from decades of experience, the books that sell are those where the audience was a guarantee.

This is logical. It’s business. They won’t continue to exist if they don’t sell books.

It should also be noted that they take a whole lot of the profits. By most methods, if you self-publish a $20 book and sell it on Amazon, you make $7.50. If you sell through a traditional publisher, you’ll make about $1.50.

Of course, you may need to use some of that $7.50 to market your book, but if you have an audience already, you may not need any money at all to market the book.

Also, you don’t have to sell it on Amazon. Last weekend we did a book launch party. I bought the author copies on Amazon for around $4, and we sold them at the party for $15. Good profit, but not as easy to go around from place to place with cases of books.

My dream is to build enough of a reputation for Indie Christian Book that readers will understand that everything we publish is good, though many of the authors are unknown. We don’t publish that many books each year compared to most. We put our heart and soul into helping our clients produce the best possible book they can. We’re already starting to get a great reputation in this regard, and I can’t wait to see what happens down the road.

The fact is, self-publishing, or going with a self-publishing company (vanity publisher!) works well if you have an audience already who is going to be the first group to buy and review the book. If you do have an audience, agents and publishers will be interested, but then, you don’t need them. I’ll never forget what I heard well-known author, Paul Jarvis say:

Yeah [that’s the funny thing]: publishers are interested in you when you don’t need them as much.”

Paul self-published his first four or five books and did well. He got an agent and book deal for his next one, A Company of One, and it did well. But he opted to go back to self-publishing after that.

It comes down to this: Everyone deserves to put their neck on the line and say what they have to say. The world changes when enough people are willing to tell the truth. If agents and publishers are not interested, it has little to do with your message or even the quality of your writing. They are taking a risk; they need to be confident they will be able to stay in business. I don’t blame them.

There are several of us publishers for a fee (or hybrid publishers who are a little of both) who will do right by you. We will help you write an amazing book.

And it still may not sell.

Because it is darn difficult to sell books. My sales pitch on a call is simple: “Imagine you don’t sell more than one copy. Do you feel called to publish this book?”

Sometimes, they say yes. Sometimes they say no. But the bar is set low.

Then a big part of working together is the audience building that needs to happen. Where can we write articles? Where can we make videos? Where can we go and speak? Those are the questions.

How can you use the last fourth of your book to recruit the reader to your mission and ministry? What kind of vision do you have for your reader community?

Those are good questions you need to answer.

There are bad apples in any industry who give that industry a bad name.

There are reasons for the traditional publishers to disparage the self-publishers, and vice versa. You just have to do your homework if you’re going to pay to publish. Talk to their clients. See if they’re getting repeat business. Even self-publishing should be a relationship with a team that cares about your message.

If you know the truth and your life illustrates it, you have a book.

If you have a cool and inspiring story to tell, you have a book.

If you know something you’ve noticed others don’t know, you have a book.

If you aren’t sure, and you want someone to chat with about it, hit me up and I’m happy to hear about what you’re writing and give you some free advice.

Jeff B. Miller

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