Marg, I don't mean to put you down here: but that sounds suspiciously like a vanity press to me.
Many companies which represent themselves as self publishing service providers (or similar, less long-winded names) are often vanity publishers. If they require you to buy copies of your books, if they ask you to cover the costs of marketing your book, if they ask you to "invest in the success of your book"; these are all indicators that you're working with a vanity press, and not a company which offers assisted self publishing (to be honest I'm not sure that there is such a thing as assisted self publishing, but so long as you know the limitations of those services that's fine, and I don't want to go off on that particular tangent right now).
I'm not taking a poke at Marg here, or at anyone else: but self publishing is hard enough as it is, without being ripped off by scammy people who aren't truthful with you. Please be careful, all of you.
(And yes, I know you all know this already, but I worry. I worry.)
Hi, Old Hack,
Where I live here in Canada there is a company called Centax Publishing. They publish mostlly cookbooks and I guess you could call them a vanity press. Back in the mid 1970s they published a series of cookbooks for a group of women and those books were hugely successful. To date they have sold over 1 million copies. Then they published another series of books for a woman by the name of Jean Pare and those were even more successful. Google her name and take a look at the cookbook empire she has built.
Additionally, they published many other cookbooks and every one of those cookbooks sold at least 10,000 copies.
The way they work is that they provide all the editing, layout, design, etc. etc. services as well as help with the food photography etc. etc. And the author pays for those services up front. They also help with marketing the books and they are very good at it.
So yes, I guess it would be considered vanity publishing. However, if I went to a printer and had books printed and got no help with them that, too, would be vanity publishing.
I spent many hours reseraching publishers and printers and it was only after all that research that I made the informed decision to go with this company. And they certainly did a great job for me. I had several printings of the book after the first one and I also did a second cookbook with them that also sold very well.
I probably would still be working with them today but I ended up getting very ill and had to let the books go out of print because I just couldn't work on them any more at the time.
Now it's 20 years later and life is very different and I can publish on Kindle and not have to put any money out front. The knowledge I gained from working with this company has been so valuable to me in my Kindle ventures that I can't possibly put a price on it. It has been the difference in me creating books I can be proud of and that are of a professional quality and writing books that do not have that kind of polish.
So yes, I probably used a 'vanity' publisher. However, I did it because that is what I
chose to do. I did not want to go through a publisher at that time. I didn't want to wait around for them to make up their minds and I knew this company knew how to market cookbooks successfully. I also knew that they would not take on a cookbook if they felt it would not succeed.
Both those two cookbooks were also picked up by a French publishing house, by the way, and were distributed in French in Quebec, France, Belgium and the parts of Africa that are French-speaking.
And a couple of years later I wrote a Bed and Breakfast Book for Albertra which was published by a publishing house, not self-published. I would still be doing that book but in today's world, books of that nature don't sell much because people go to the Internet for that kind of information.
Anyway, my whole point is that sometimes there are good and valid reasons to do what I did. I would never encourage anyone to use the types of vanity publishers who offer similar services unless they have a long track record of success with other books. But if I knew anyone who wanted a great cookbook published I would not hesitate to recommend this company to them at any time, anywhere. They are still creating successful cookbooks every year.
Marg