Vanity Press (VP): Vanity is expensive
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 6, 2010
Vanity Press (VP): Vanity is expensive; (May 6, 2010)
Vanity Press serves special clients. You type a manuscript and you have the urge to publish it. You are turned down by many editors and then you decide to finance the printing and dissemination. Your vanity is a t stake after investing enormous time and energy on writing hundreds of pages. This is when you get hold of one of the Vanity Presses. The VP showers you with praises and lauds your talent of a most promising writer and a “would be” famous author. You sign a formal standard contract. It is supposed to be a contract but it is not: Your only option is to accept the standard contract or decline it. The VP will take in charge publishing and then disseminating articles and summaries of your books in dailies.
The contract does not stipulate the number of copies to print but there is a minimum; 100 copies will be sent to you to distribute to friends and acquaintances and 200 copies the VP will send to dailies and magazines, which most likely ends in waste baskets if indeed mailed. The contract also stipulate that unsold copies will be destroyed (no need to stipulate a time frame for destruction since no copies will be left for that cruel job). Now, the initial 300 copies are all gone and you are requested for your own benefit to print some more as the printing presses are still hot. Your enlarged vanity may fall in that trap: the harder you fall the more expensive your vanity. Then, one day, the VP warns you that it has accumulated a stock of 10,000 copies you have ordered and the VP is about to destroy the entire stock. You resist this murderous potential action by buying say 3,000 more copies. At your request the VP starts printing your 3,000 copies. May be you get the idea of actually contemplating the 10,000 stock of copies and running a quality sample check? Tough luck if you are ever seeing anything.
There are many kinds of VP schemes. For example, you pay to have your glorious name published with the famous and glamorous names in a catalogue or specialized dictionary; the real famous names receive two sentences at best but your name can take two pages if you pay for that length.
The richer you are, the greater your vanity and the happier the Vanity Presses. So far, WordPress.com is publishing my articles for free but making tons of money from my labor. There is always someone making profit of your varieties of vanity.
Adonis Diaries 
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