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RE: Publish On Demand with Booklocker / Writer's Digest
Subject:RE: Publish On Demand with Booklocker / Writer's Digest From:"David Downing" <DavidDowning -at- users -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 19 Dec 2002 10:05:10 -0500
<<if you want to
publish a book that is read you should do the effort (and it can be a
big
effort) to find a publisher who pays advances and royalties to its
authors.>>
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.
Now if you're aware of all this, and are prepared to act as promoter and
merchant for you book, is can work for you. I knew someone who went to
the trouble of putting a bunch of copies of an original book together by
hand. The effort was impressive, but obviously home-grown, and this
person might have done better to seek the services of a vanity press.
Alas, some unfortunate people think their book is going to get promoted
and sold for them, just like with a regular publisher, and *they* get a
rude surprise. However, a vanity press would not be guilty of ripping
these people off unless they tried to foster this misconception.
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