victoriastrauss said:
Ah, but this sort of vanity is becoming more and more typical, as authors get wise to the vanity stigma (same thing happened with the reading fee, which used to be the commonest form of agent scam and now is rare). When authors start to get wise, the scammers sidestep. What the vanities are doing nowadays...
Victoria, I'd be last to butt heads with you, but I fear your post unfairly conflates "vanity publisher" with "scammer". I don't know if you meant it to. I've quoted the part of your post that gave me that impression, and bolded the bit where the impression is strongest.
I'm sure you know this, but just to reiterate for those playing along at home: Many vanity publishers are scammers, but some vanity publishers are honest (e.g. LuLu). Vanity publishing, like professional editing, is a legitimate service which meets some people's needs. But this service model is easily abused by scammers.
Perhaps one of the recognizable marks of a scam vanity press (or a scam professional editor) is the exaggerated hype which claims that their service will meet
everybody's needs, that those who claim not to need their service are either misinformed or must be part of the great big publishing conspiracy that keeps new writers down. Also claims to help you shortcut your way to success, or to revolutionize the publishing industry--those are suspect. Lulu doesn't hype itself as a panacea. CafePress doesn't aspire to burying Tor and Bantam. But PA... oh, the claims PA makes! The pirate ships, the sneers, the smugness!
(Just for fun, y'all can read what P. Barry Jones has to say in his
defense of brand-new display site Zirdland.
Hear! his much-put-upon appeal that naysayers must either be "better-than-thou ... millionaire author
" or "overly-rejected (ie: poorly marketed) writer"! See! him scoff at the industry's current status as "a literary lottery"! Marvel! as he dismisses out-of-hand and schemes to revolutionize "the query-letter shuffle" that predates his birth--or at least his experience--by millenia! Ah, the superiority! The appearance of selfless martyrdom! The utter wrongheadedness of it all!)