September 11, 2007 • Print This Post

I just got around to reading the Sunday paper. Kind of sorry I did. The front page of Sunday’s Business section of the San Diego Union Tribune included a story about a vanity publisher. Very frustrating stuff. Frustrating because these unpublished folks were paying this “publisher” $5,700 to get their books in print. This was a scam - of course!!! If you pay someone to publish your book, you are not published. Sorry, but you’re not. Publishers pay you and not vice versa. Really, isn’t that obvious?

For those considering going this route - stop. Also know the following from the article: “publisher” Ed Johnson praised the manuscripts, made all sorts of promises and took the money. Sound familiar? After giving hope, this guy ignored his wannabee authors. One scammed writer’s experience went like this:

…he was promised a preliminary copy of his book for editing review within a month, but several months passed before he received a copy that was riddled with hundreds of misspellings and editing errors.

He complained, but didn’t get his calls returned. Incensed, Wallace drove from Colorado to San Diego in January 2003 to confront Johnson, and was shocked to learn the firm was nothing more than a bedroom-size office in a converted motel.

A woman who worked for this supposed publisher said:

Karstens, a former Martell employee, said Johnson purposely deceived potential clients about the scale of his one-room operation. He used pseudonyms when answering the telephone or in correspondence to potential clients to “make it seem like he had a staff.”

Karstens also said Johnson instructed her to tell clients who telephoned him that he was “on the other side of the building” so they’d think the company was housed in a large facility.

Karstens said she was hired as an office manager. But Johnson soon had her editing manuscripts, a job for which she had no qualifications, she said.

Yeah, the office manager was editing the manuscripts. Not exactly what you want for your $5,700, is it? I know the drive to be published can be extreme. I do. Still, use your common sense and don’t get scammed. Try to get a legitimate publisher interested in your work, accept that it can be a long process and understand that maybe, just maybe, it’s not meant to be.

I’ll end with a quote from Victoria Strauss of Wirter Beware because she says it better than I ever could:

Vanity publishers don’t look for quality – they publish anyone who will pay, according to industry experts. And while they often promise to market and distribute books, such efforts are usually nominal to nonexistent because the firms make their money from the authors, not on book sales…

Uh-huh. What she said.

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