How can I tell if the company who promises to publish my book is a real publisher or just another vanity press publisher trying to take my money? Do I really need an ISBN number?

How can I tell if the company who promises to publish my book is a real publisher or just another vanity press publisher trying to take my money? Do I really need an ISBN number?

Actually, the answer to both questions is pretty easy. If you submit your manuscript to a “Publisher,” receive an acceptance letter, a royalty contract and a promise of a check as a royalty advance upon signing the contract, you are dealing with a publisher and are, in truth, being published. Any deviation from the above will usually mean that you are dealing with one of the many vanity presses that should be avoided at all costs.

Ten years ago, one only had to avoid the full-page ads in the telephone book that said, “Attn: Authors.” Take a look today; many of them are still there. As friendly and tempting as these ads appear, a manuscript submission to one of these places generally results in a very nice “Your manuscript has been accepted for publication,” letter along with a plan for how you were going to help pay for the publication of your book. They say, this is how that say Edgar Allen Poe started. These publishers were and still are, no more than scam artists who specialize in taking peoples money and delivering very little, if anything, in return.

Today, with the evolution of the Internet, these vanity press scam artists are slicker and more creative in their con than ever. While the full-page ad vanity presses are still present, many have taken on new distinguished names like “subsidy press” or “cooperative press” or “print-on-demand publisher”. The only difference between all of these is the amount of money they take from you, the author.

It’s sort of like the story of the difference between a Democrat and a Republican. The Democrat raises your taxes a great deal because he’s liberal. The Republican raises your taxes a little because he’s conservative. The bottom line is that they both raise your taxes. The same thing goes with these high-tech vanity presses. The amount of money may vary but the result remains the same. You pay an inflated price for the production of your book and the only sales are the ones you make yourself.

The only thing that keeps most of these guys from going to jail is a disclaimer buried deep within their contract stating that no promise of sales is being made and very few people recover the money that they invest; much less make any additional money. In short, any sales that are going to be made are going to be made by the author.

The final kick in the teeth in dealing with this type of publisher is, after you finally figure out what is really going on and try to take the book back and publish it somewhere else, you find that you have to start all over with your marketing efforts because your book is registered in the name of the vanity publisher and the ISBN number is not transferable. It is not owned by you and is not registered in your name. You do not have all the rights to your book.

The most common tactic used by these modern day scam artists is to tell you that they will “assign” or “sell” you an ISBN number. They lead you to believe that your book is registered in your name and reinforce this by telling you that “You retain all the rights”. Unfortunately many of these companies are financed by large companies with huge advertising budgets so they come across as being quite legitimate. Some are even partially owned by large publishing companies. They all claim thousands of customers but very few books are sold by these companies other than to the authors and their friends and family.

A good example of the deception practiced by these vanity presses is that one of these companies recently announced it paid its one millionth dollar in royalty payments to authors. If you figure an average book size of 256 pages and a royalty of $5.50 per book, their published rate, it comes to 181,000 books sold. That doesn’t sound bad by itself. The trick comes when you dig a little deeper into the old press releases. In one the same company claims to have over 10,000 author/customers while in another the release proclaims over a million and a half books sold. You do the math. It comes to eighteen copies sold to the “general public” compared to one hundred and thirty copies sold to the author. If that is what you have in mind… go for it. If not, read on.

If you have not obtained your ISBN number (actually ten are the minimum) from RR Bowker, you do not own it. Buying your own ISBN is the single most important thing that you will do as an Independent Publisher.

So, for the answer to the second question, read on. The ISBN number is what identifies you as the publisher. Once you have obtained you ISBN numbers from RR Bowker, you are no longer a “self-publisher” you are “A” publisher – an Independent Publisher. There is no difference at that point between you and Random House except for the fact that Random House publishes more titles than you (more than most publishers for that matter). You assign one of these numbers to your first book. Once you own the ISBN number, it remains the same for the life of the book. You can change printers, distributors, wholesalers or retailers. You can change whatever you want. The book remains yours. If ten years from now, someone orders a copy of your book, you, as the publisher, will get the order. If you don’t own the number, the person who does, will get the order. Most of these vanity/subsidy presses will not even be around ten years from now so the order for that book will end up going unfulfilled.

If you haven’t gathered it in reading this, I’ll tell you that these vanity presses are a pet peeve of mine. Over the last thirty years, I have seen too many people mortgage their houses or run up the totals on their credit cards in an attempt to have their dream of being published fulfilled, only to be disappointed by some scam artist. Creating an Independent Publishing company and publishing your first book has never been easier or more economical. The main ingredient for success remains the same. If you are willing to do your research and put in a lot of personal effort, you can become successful.

If you have a question pertaining to the publishing production process, please feel free to contact me at ron@rjcom.com.

Last 5 posts by Ron Pramschufer

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