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Is The Arts Council Funding A Vanity Publisher?
Kay Green
Earlyworks Press
Dear Editor,
Are you a vanity publisher?
Yours,
A Hopeful Author
Dear Hopeful,
I am afraid you are going to have to work out a more subtle approach. The internet is full of sharks who would like to devour your wallet, and none of them is going to answer 'yes' to that question.
Yours,
A Small Press Editor
No, I am not joking. I really have received that email quite a few times. Authors are not famous for having large amounts of business sense. A lot of them have big dreams, and there is an enormous and flourishing industry preying on them. I get emails and letters every day from would-be professional authors who have got themselves trapped in worse-than-useless agreements but this week, all the emails I got said pretty much the same thing:
Help! I've been offered a contract by YouWriteOn. They are offering to publish 5000 people for free. Is it vanity publishing?
I get similar cried for help so often that I decided this would be a good time to try to sort out what exactly 'Vanity Publishing' is. For one thing, it's a term regularly thrown at self-published authors and independents, as well as those who have a CV made up of endless lists of publications in the likes of Forward Press poetry anthologies. Other cry 'vanity' whenever an author contributes financially to the production of their work - but that doesn't make sense to me. Many kinds of publishing can provide a perfectly viable business, for example when a specialist author is self-publishing to provide books to a niche market too small to interest mainstream houses. True, there are many grey areas, and many companies make a profit by thickening the fog, feeding the dreams of inexperienced authors and then pocketing their money. So how do we define 'vanity press'? For me, there are two key factors. First, where is the publisher is making their money? Second, how seriously are they attempting to market the author's work? A reputable publisher should be aiming to make their profit by selling books so, with these key factors in mind, I looked into the YouWriteOn 'free publishing' offer.
The first thing that struck me was that YouWriteOn appear to be Arts Council funded, so on the plus side, we can assume someone is watching over their motives and their actions. But then I saw all the debates about this scheme on the internet, and I saw anxious people saying, 'it must be kosher because they're funded by the Arts Council' - that's worrying. One of the consequences of being funded is that YouWriteOn don't need to make money from book sales. That should ring alarm bells. The 'publishers' aren't investing much - these books are to be pod (print on demand) publishing. That means that a book they publish exists only on the Internet unless someone clicks on a pay button. When a copy is ordered, a copy is printed. So there is no financial motivation to market the books. YouWriteOn do offer an additional option (which writers have to pay almost £40 for) which makes the book more visible in the real world but - the writer has to pay, so there goes the 'free publishing' element. (Whatever happened to the world where writers actually got paid for their books?)
True, authors don't always approach publishers with the intention of getting rich. I am a small press publisher myself, and I run a private (ie, unfunded) club for independent and freelance writers. Sometimes, club members have contributed financially to our projects. They are always asked to contribute both sweat and brain-power to the marketing effort. But here comes the key point. There IS a marketing effort. The YouWriteOn offer to publish 5000 authors for free comes with a contract that exonerates the publisher from ANY marketing effort or expense.
Perhaps the most alarming point of all is that YouWriteOn don't provide free author copies. Most publishers are delighted to give the writer an armful of books to kick off the publicity campaign. Used as review copies, for readings, or even as gifts for friends, those free copies get the book out into the world and start people talking about it. YouWriteOn are not doing this. Authors must pay the full price if they want to own a copy of their book. This is reminiscent of companies like Forward Press, who produce anthologies (books including work by hundreds of writers), and then charge the authors for a copy - sometimes even make the author's purchase of several copies a condition of publication. Bearing in mind the number of people who pay the - quite high - price of those books in order to see their name in print, it seems likely that most authors will want one or more copies of a their own YouWriteOn publications - maybe half a dozen copies - and that is where the profit will come from.
To sum up, YouWriteOn will put electronic images of 5000 books on a website, and print a copy if and when someone buys it. The authors will probably buy around 30,000 books between them, so YouWriteOn will get 40% of the profit on 30,000 books just from sales to the authors. They don't have to do anything except print books that are already ordered and paid for. They can't lose. What will the authors gain?
Presumably, the authors are participating because they want people to read their books. If this is the case, why not put a pod edition on their own website, put their own pay-buttons on, and take 100% of the profit from any sales? You may say an individual author's website wouldn't attract many buyers, but how many will YouWriteOn attract? Would you buy a book from a publisher who you know has just published 5000 authors work on a first-come first-served basis?
Or perhaps the authors participate because they hope to attract the attention of a mainstream publisher. Okay, it is possible a commissioning editor or an agent will get interested in an author whilst browsing this site but how likely is that? I've met quite a lot of editors and agents. They are busy people. They really do not spend that much time browsing websites at random. I think all the authors will gain from this project is a little initial warmth followed by a severe disappointment.
Is this vanity publishing? Well, under the banner of the Arts Council, YouWriteOn have embarked on a no-risk project where they will publish anything and everything, hoover up the profits when authors buy copies and exempt themselves from spending any money publicising those authors.
I decided to reserve judgement for a little while. The publishing world is in flux at the moment. Who knows what will work? Maybe this is the beginning of a wonderful new, egalitarian world for writers. The telling point, I thought, would be when we find out who buys the YouWriteOn books. Maybe it wouldn't just be the authors and their friends. - But there is more. Several of my own club members received contracts from YouWriteOn and one of our more worldly-wise members wrote to the Arts Council to find out more about the funding position. I had a look at the contracts our members had received and discovered to my horror that the £40 'optional extra' we'd heard about was an ISBN number - so authors are paying £40 for that basic property that makes a book published in the eyes of the world - and if YouWriteOn have bought a batch of ISBNs for this project, they will have cost them only a few pounds each. The profit for YouWriteOn starts rolling in before the books are even online! And then our club member received the reply from the Arts Council, which stated that the Arts Council are asking YouWriteOn to make it absolutely clear that this is NOT an Arts Council sponsored project. The letter advises anyone who is offered one of these contracts to contact The Society of Authors for advice on 'self-publishing and vanity publishing'. Well, that was a week ago but I've just visited the YouWriteOn website and their home page still says 'Arts Council funded YouWriteOn.com will publish the first 5,000 writers who contact us'
Not all is vanity, but looking round the internet, I think quite a lot of it is. I implore would-be authors everywhere to come down off their clouds and learn a bit of business sense. If they don't, their wallets will be emptied whether or not they suffer from vanity.
Article submitted Monday, October 06, 2008
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