Vanity publishers: Why you must avoid them

You must avoid vanity publishers by all means! You should not have any business to do with these versions of traditional publishers.

Well, can we actually refer to them as traditional publishers? That is what they try to call themselves but they are not that – they are vanity publishers!

As usual, we monitored discussion around vanity publishers and the experience of authors with their services on the social media. I am presenting here in this post on vanity publishers, comments and reactions of authors’ experiences in the hands of vanity publishers.

What are vanity publishers?

Vanity publishers are publishing firms who offer different publishing services to authors by asking them to make upfront payment before they can signed on as authors.

What singles out vanity publishers is their demand for upfront money payment from authors before they can sign a contract with them. This is always the cloudy parts of vanity publishers’ services.

Some of them will ask authors to make upfront payment to buy certain number of copies of their published books before a contract van be signed.

Authors must detest and avoid these unprofessional arrangements of making upfront payment before a publishing contract is signed. This is not ideal as there are lots of red lines (cloudy and shady ideas) behind these types of arrangements that will not work to the advantage of the author.

You may need to read this other post on our blog, traditional publishing scam

An author experience with vanity publishers

I want you to look at the experience of an author who made a post on this in one of our social media groups:

Hello, everyone. Recently I’ve been emailed by Hawes & Jenkins about them being interested in publishing one of my books. I haven’t responded to them yet, but have done some digging into them.

They’re a self publishing hybrid publisher that has the author pay a package deal for editing, publishing, distribution, marketing, promotion, creating YouTube, Facebook, and other social media pages for your work as well as an author page.

I’ve been self publishing the 8 books I’ve written so far through Amazon and have sold 1100 copies all together since January of 2021.

Multiple vanity/hybrid publishers have reach out to me since then and I’ve turned them all down since they charge a ridiculous amount for the package deals, don’t usually follow through on their end, and push further package deals on you to squeeze more money between $5k-$10k or more on top of what you’ve already given to them.

I know most of, if not all, vanity/hybrid publishers are scams, however, it seems like this is where the literary author business is heavily going to since most traditional publishers are very strict, have differing guideline requirements, only read the first 1-3 chapters, or 10-50 pages of your manuscript, and are uber selective as to who they publish.

Again, I’ve been self publishing for near 4 years. I’ve done almost everything I can personally in my free time outside of working two jobs and it is difficult to manage everything on my own. I’m wondering if any of you have done work with Hawes & Jenkins and whether or not if they’re a good legitimate company to do business with.

From what I’ve seen they only have 1 complaint against them.

Responses from fellow authors

Here are the responses and comments from fellow authors on this issue.

First response:

Don’t trust them, I honestly could never trust this. They make fortunes off us and laugh at how easy we are to be scammed. I know it is hard to market, I am going it alone, but they can’t promise sales, no one can. Maybe change up your cover to be more eye catching, remember people judge a book by the cover.

Second response 

Never ever use that hybrid publisher thing it’s the worst. Here is what you actually need to do.

Go to their website and see what books (similar to yours) have recently been published in the last 2 years.

Research to see what promotion they have done for those books. Look at the quality and content of any promo or marketing they have done.

Better yet, see if you can contact an author. If you go to their Facebook page and search the title of the book, you might be able to find a post they have made about the book. Often the author will like or comment, OR one of their family members. You can then try to find them that way.

If you can’t find someone who is happy to chat casually about their experience then make a judgement based on the quality of their promotional output.

Like do you find anything if you google the book of the other author? Do they make a book trailer that is better than anything you could create yourself?

Do the YouTube channels of their other authors have actual regular content or is it just a single video that doesn’t really impress in the first place?

I went with a hybrid publisher. They are limited in what they will do for you, some will be better than others.

If it’s your first book, also know that marketing and promotional opportunities will be a team effort and you will likely need to do a lot of the work.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions I am happy to help. I do not offer marketing services just adding this because sometimes people think my comments are only helpful because I’m secretly trying to sell something.

Me: You will agree with that was a lot of information in a comment!

Second response

Never. Ever. Ever. Pay for someone to publish your work. EVER.

Me: That was short and straight to the point.

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