Vanity, Vanity, All Is Vanity...publishing!

So what am I wafflin on about? In 2006 Harker published bis book "Directive 19", via a "vanity" publishing house called Outskirts Press in Denver, Colorado in the US. A vanity publoishing house is a printer who takes a manuscript - and a FEE - from a writer and prints his book. Used to be they did short runs of a few hundred or a thousand...now they run off some and the rest are "print-on-demand" - a punter orders a book over the Internet, and eventually the order gets to somewhere like Outskirts who print a copy, bag it and mail it to you.

Who uses them? well - anyone who has something to put in a book and either they get told where to go by normal, mainline publishing houses...or who ALREADY know what they have in their inky mitts would get filed in the universal in-tray under the desk!

If you pick up a bestselling paperback in a bookstore - that's the end of a LONG process of someone submitting a BRILLIANT book or novel to a publisher - many times - THEN months of work with an editor to get it into shape for printing IF - and ONLY if - the publisher thinks it has a chance of selling.

Selfpublishing is for people who simply CAN'T get their book published because a REAL publisher knows it won't sell, and who decides to use their own cash and go ahead...or for those saddos who DAREN'T put their book to any quality control or degree of editing and content-checking!