If you are on the outside looking in, you might be thinking how writing is a glamorous occupation. However, most people who depict the writing profession leave out some important bits about what writers face. Think liver failure, carpal tunnel syndrome, madness, and penury. So, is writing a terrible profession? The answer is definitely not. Writing stories and sharing with the world to get paid is a sweet deal, no matter how you choose to look at it. The publishing industry has its ups and downs. For instance, there are many new authors that want to make names for themselves in the industry and get paid in the process. However, there are also many sharks waiting to tear them apart.
Publishing is not a business for the faint-hearted. The path to success is like a maze and this makes it easier for people with bad intentions to take advantage of unsuspecting authors. There are many organizations that claim to be helping authors, but a remarkable number of them are doing the exact opposite.
The differences between unscrupulous companies and genuine ones were easier to identify several years ago. However, the eBook revolution made it much harder to distinguish companies with good intentions from the rest. In the past, traditional publishers bought an author’s rights to his books and sold the books, sharing some of the profit with the author. Self-published authors used to print many books and pile them in their garages for sale at events and other places. Vanity presses were the ones to avoid because they lured authors with the illusion that they would make them successful, only to spit them out after making money from the poor authors and selling few books.
Today’s publishing industry is quite different from what it was a few years ago. A good number of vanity publishers are now owned by big publishing houses. They promote them as easy ways for authors to ‘self-publish’ their books. What these vanity presses actually do is employ horrifically expensive and ineffective ways for authors to publish their books. The chances of books succeeding when published by vanity publishers are slim at best. The worst part is that authors bear all the financial risk in the process. The end result is often poorly selling books, broke authors, and vanity press operators smiling all the way to the bank.
Experienced authors would say that business is business and the authors who get exploited should have spent more time researching the company before deciding to use it to publish their books. However, it is unfair to blame these authors because most of them are usually new in the industry and they don’t know the intricacies of publishing.
Every author who has succeeded was at some point willing to do anything to sell their book. At that point, the author tried everything possible but often came up with nothing. If the author had been approached by vanity presses with their promises of great sales, there is a good chance that they would have agreed. The blame should therefore be directed at unscrupulous self-publishing companies rather than at unsuspecting, usually first time authors.
