Subsidy Publishers

Subsidy publishers are also not new to the publishing world, but they are not legitimate. In the subsidy (also called vanity) model, the author pays a company to print and do some marketing of her book. Subsidy publishers accept all or most manuscripts, so if the author has enough money she can get her book published. The author then keeps all the money from any sales of the book.

A slight variation is called the equity publishers, which may be more selective than the subsidy publishers and may offer more editorial and marketing services. The author still pays all the costs of producing the book and also keeps 100 percent of the sales.

Frequently, subsidy publishers market to aspiring authors, and sometimes an author feels flattered that a publisher has approached her. Then she finds out that there is a cost involved, and she wonders whether the publisher is legal. Genuine publishers rarely approach authors, and they never ask the author to pick up the costs of publishing. Because more and more people have heard of vanity presses, they often offer superficial editorial and quality guidelines to make it appear that they do reject manuscripts.

These types of shady publishers are not a good deal for the author because they are generally expensive and don’t provide any editorial or marketing expertise or services. To add insult to injury, some of them “buy” the rights to the work and pay the author a royalty only, fooling him or her into thinking this is a regular business. Thousands of people who have been taken in by subsidy publishers have musty, out-of-date books sitting in their garages to show for their naiveté.

Subsidy publishers handle the logistics of getting a book produced and printed but at much higher cost than an author would do it himself or herself. And although many subsidy publishers promise to market books, often very little marketing actually happens.

Tanyab 05:53, 10 November 2008 (UTC) | www.publishing-store.com