the dangers of vanity publishing – follow-up

My post about the dangers of vanity publishing generated some interesting points on Facebook, which are worth mentioning.

1.) One thing I should have mentioned in the first post was the problem of rights. If you self-publishing your book, you keep all the rights – ebook, paperback, audiobook, game rights, and so forth. If you sign with a vanity publisher, you are probably going to give up all your rights, and pay for the privilege of doing so!

This is the very definition of a bad bargain, and yet another reason to avoid vanity publishers.

2.) On Facebook, Michael asked:

“Suppose you only wanted, or it was only feasible (for some reason) to sell physical books, not ebooks. Do you think that alters whether or not indie publishing is the right route? Does it change the balance of the equation?”

I think the only ways to sell paper books nowadays is to 1.) hand sell a bunch of them at conventions or speaking gigs or whatever, or 2.) be famous enough that your publisher pushes your book to be displayed at Barnes & Noble and Costco. Which means that option one is the realistic one for most people, which means you’d be better off self-publishing, buying a couple of boxes of your own books with the publisher’s discount (I can get a copy of CLOAK OF DRAGONS in print for $4.33 plus shipping & handling) and sell them with a markup at speaking gigs. Like, I’d buy 100 copies of CLOAK OF DRAGONS at $4.33 (and order them far enough in advance that I could pay the lowest shipping rate), and then sell them at $10 or $15.

I think a lot of writers do this, and for nonfiction writers it can be a real winner. Like, you know how sometimes if you go to a lecture or a convention something, and at the end of the lecture the speaker is selling a bunch of his books at the back? That’s a good way to sell paper copies. However, it doesn’t work very well for genre fiction (which is what I write), and I have no interest in going to conventions, so this isn’t a strategy I’ve ever pursued.

3.) On Facebook, Cherise asks:

“I saw the article only factored in on what you paid to publish the book. Do you have a similar article on what you pay to advertise/promote? before and after publishing your books?”

I usually spend about 12% of my monthly gross on advertising, though that can go up or down from month to month. I tend not to advertise new books, but instead focus the ads on the free first books in the various series since that seems to have the best conversion. Advertising is my biggest expense, so I’m always trying to cut that down whenever possible.

4.) Via email, Dennis asks:

“Don’t you pay to publish your audiobooks?” 

Not exactly. What I do is I pay a narrator to produce my audiobook, and then I publish it myself. I also keep the rights for the audio recording for myself. If you listen all the way to the end of the audiobook, the narrator will say “audio recording copyright Jonathan Moeller, 2019 (or appropriate year).”

Basically, it’s no different from paying someone to format an ebook or make a book cover, just on a larger scale.

Now, if I paid someone to make the audiobook, gave them all the rights to it, and trusted them to send the money on time, THAT would be vanity publishing!

-JM