Re: Question about Vanity Presses and Promotional "Serv
I think that a lot of these "services" are essentially worthless. Even if they're conscientious about only collecting current addresses, and make some effort at targeting them (a pretty tall assumption with most of these services), their strategies are based on the cheapest and most ineffective of promotional methods: bulk e-mails and faxes, press releases, flyers. A few try to distinguish themselves by letting you piggyback on a group ad of some kind, or by issuing a catalogue, or by providing you with bookmarks or postcards.
All these methods were ineffective before the influx of vanity POD (I know--I've tried some of them). Now that every self-pubbed author and their sister is using them, I daresay that except in cases of local interest, 99.999% of these promotional things go ignored. As a book reviewer, I get lots of spam review requests from POD- and self-pubbed authors. I'm always glad to consider a personal request, but the spam stuff I just delete.
It's not just the vanity presses. There are more and more companies and websites that exist for the sole purpose of offering this sort of "promotion"--like Bookman, which is one of the most obnoxious. I've been meaning for some time to add a section to Writer Beware about these services, but I just haven't had time.
- Victoria