Academic Self-Publishing--3
If you are looking to self-publish without being in business as a publisher, here is a working list of subsidy presses: ArborBooks, AuthorHouse, BookLocker, DogEar, Falcon Books, Infinity, iuniverse, Lulu, Outskirts, Publish America, Trafford, Vantage, Vision Books International (VBI), Writers Collective, XLibris, and Xulon. You would need to investigate further to see which publisher would be right for what you want to publish and which would have the right terms and conditions for you.
There are in addition small commercial subsidy presses that focus specifically on academic authors looking to self-publish scholarly works or custom textbooks for classroom use. See, for example, senatehall.com, cjp.com, and brownwalker.com. Open access publishing is another whole subject, and I'd like to talk about that next, quoting from the second edition of my book, Writing and Developing Your College Textbook (Atlantic Path Publishing, 2008).
Labels: self-publishing, subsidy publishing, subvention, vanity press
Academic Self-Publishing--2
Subsidy publishers vary in their approach to the lucrative self-publishing market. Some simply prey upon unwary authors; others straightforwardly explain how to use their services appropriately. Personal, family, church, academic, and organizational records, history, biography, and memoir are appropriate uses, for example, as the goal of distribution usually is non-commercial and the intended market is restricted or small. These self-published works do not even need an ISBN if they are not intended for distribution to the trade.
Some subsidy presses say they screen for quality and may or may not accept manuscripts. These houses may have sales catalogs and use books self-published under their imprint to build a branded reputation for their company, making screening a good idea. However, most vanity publishers, including companies billing themselves as “turn-key publishers,” will publish anything you send them, without comment. They may or may not offer extra paid services of copyediting, ghostwriting, or reviewing. Poor quality of content, among other things, is what has made self-published works unwelcome in the trade.
For academics self-publishing with vanity presses, however, the issue may be lack of professional peer review rather than of trade acceptance. Peer review is essential for vetting or sanctioning scholarly work as authoritative, accurate, etc. Print or online publications that lack any kind of review process tend to be ignored, justly or not, in the academic community. I'll discuss this limitation further in a subsequent post.
Some self-publishing houses say they offer marketing, promotion, and distribution services—which you pay for--and seem to be well connected. They make money at your expense, however, some offering you a royalty as little as 20% on your work in exchange for their efforts. Thus, a house can double-dip without making any capital investment at all. At no expense to itself, it can make money from you and then turn around and make money from your book.
Reputable subsidy publishers are direct and clear about what they can and cannot accomplish for you and your publication. Some claim you can self-publish for free. Disreputable companies claim they can profitably distribute your self-published book nationally or internationally and get you on Oprah.
Labels: self-publishing, subsidy publishing, subvention, vanity press
Academic Self-Publishing
Well, I've been neglecting to post lately. 'Tis a lonely enterprise, given the lack of responses or dialogue. Lately I've even heard blogging referred to (among the youtube and facebook set) as an enterprise for "losers". Perhaps blogging is losing its cachet in the Internet world (aside from celebrity bloggers), or perhaps blogging has been appropriated by commercial enterprises for marketiing purposes. Whatever the case, I would now like to think publicly about another subject that interests me--self-publishing.
I am a self-published author, as well as a publisher of others' works (see www.atlanticpathpublishing.com). In the course of learning how to be in business as a publisher I have acquired much intelligence about publishing models. Aspiring authors, especially academic authors, are vulnerable to grave errors in choosing among publishing models. I'm not talking about open access publishing in this case but about subsidy publishing.
Subsidy publishing, sometimes called subvention in academe, occurs when authors pay publishers to have their work published. A legitimate context for subvention is a manuscript with little or no demand or commercial value--say, on a subject so esoteric that not enough copies can be sold to recover the costs of printing--or a work intended for free distribution. In other contexts, however, many authors naively cross the line into vanity publishing.
Vanity presses include subsidy presses and so-called co-publishers who charge you to self-publish under their aegis. They provide all the services that a traditional publisher normally would supply--including registration of copyright, assignment of an ISBN, and production and manufacturing (e.g., book design and printing)--at your expense. This expense is greater than in traditional publishing—greater in per-unit cost (because only a small number of copies is ever printed) and greater in reduced potential income (because the companies typically also keep more than half of any revenue from sales).
These companies claim that you retain ownership of your book, but copyright law already guarantees that you own your work. By signing a contract with the company, you may be assigning copyright to them inadvertently. And if you use their ISBN, they become the publisher of record, with all the rights that publishers of record have, and their logo may appear on the cover or copyright page of your book. Purchasing a single ISBN from them or some other source does not make you the publisher of record, unless you have set up and registered a company of your own. In any case, people in the book industry recognize and do not trust “scalper” and “proxy” ISBNs.
Thus, you should not use a vanity/subsidy publisher if you want to sell more than 100 copies of your book, recover your costs and then some, or offer your book to the trade, i.e., to bookstores for resale to their customers or to libraries for acquisition to serve their patrons. Booksellers and acquisitions librarians simply will not buy vanity press books. And there's more--in the next post.
Labels: academic authors, authorship, self-publishing, subsidy publishing, subvention, vanity press
