Re: Publish On Demand with Booklocker / Writer's Digest

["Alexander Hellemans" <hellemans -at- libero -dot- it>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Downing" <DavidDowning -at- users -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 4:05 PM
Subject: RE: Publish On Demand with Booklocker / Writer's Digest


>
> If I may put my two cents in here, vanity publishing is not necessarily
> a bad thing, as long as you know exactly what you are and are not
> getting.  In a sense, it's a misnomer, because you're really paying to
> have the books *printed*, rather than published.  What you get for your
> money is x number of copies of your professionally printed and bound
> book.  They come to you in a big box, and that's the end of it.  You DO
> NOT get any kind of promotion -- no ads, no reviews, nothing.  The
> reason you don't get royalties is that nobody's selling the copies of
> your book -- which are all sent to you.
>

This is not the way many vanity presses present themselves--they are not
printers, but publishers, that is, they promote your book, advertise it,
distribute it.  What often happens is that they only print or bind  a small
number of the agreed number of books and try to convince book stores in your
neighborhoud to stock a few copies.
See for example:
http://www.poemtree.com/Jerome/Publishing-Chapter09.htm

Self-publishing is something different, and there is the example of this
Yale professor who published himself a book about the history of graphs, and
it became a bestseller.  I can't find the reference for this book, I've seen
it about 17 years ago, and it really was a beautiful and interesting book.

Print-on-demand can also be useful to some authors, for example, they can
keep a book alive that has been declared out of print by the original
publisher.

Alexander Hellemans



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