Two Scams I Sort of Fell For

Among the advertisements you may see on this blog, there will likely be somebody claiming that they can get you published within 30 days or something similar. I want you to know that with outfits such as these the quality of printing will be poor, you will have almost no chance of turning a profit, and in some cases they will take your money and give you precious little in return.

Self-publishing is a legitimate form - particularly for scholarly works and other niche interests, or if you simply want a family cookbook to be bound nicely so you can distribute it at the reunion - and entirely different from a vanity press. I will use the explanation at tvtropes.org (the finest wiki in the 'Verse), as it is more eloquent and precise than I could manage on my own:

It's worth noting that there are major differences between a vanity press and a self-publisher. In self-publishing, the writer takes on the duties of editor and formatter himself, contracting with a printing firm to produce the physical book. The contract is above-board and completely honest, and the writer knows in advance that the content of his book is totally up to him. The printer doesn't promise anything it isn't going to provide, and doesn't mislead the writer by implying that it will provide more services than it will. Some self-published books also suck, of course, but many (possibly most) do not: self-publishing is especially common among niche non-fiction writers whose subject is simply too specialized for a large commercial print run to be profitable...

...Self-publishing is also very common in the developing world, where in some countries (India, most notably) more books are self-published than are published by commercial publishers. Online self-publishing has also been taking off as well, with site such as Lulu letting any aspiring author submit his manuscript, choose the printing and binding options, and printing and delivering them on demand to anyone who buys the book.

So, to be clear: self-publishing is when you spend $500 you know you'll never recover just to get your book out there. Vanity publishing is when you're cheated out of $50,000 by evil conmen who promise to make you the next J.K. Rowling. See the difference?

For the rest of the both informative and entertaining page, go here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VanityPublishing . Be warned, if you have a certain kind of mind, TV Tropes will suck you in for hours of enjoyment that won't let you get anything done.

Anyway, I nearly fell victim to one scam and fell slightly victim to another, though not to any lasting harm. Both of these were during the yearning period from age fifteen to nearly seventeen, after I wanted to get a novel published but before my mentor/fairy godmother Sally Odgers told me about Eternal Press and they accepted me (though I had to wait until my eighteenth birthday to actually sign a contract, given some of the genres EP publishes).

The first was Publish America, which claimed to have exhaustively read Halloween Romance and wanted to publish it. My father's protective and very wise decision to do a search for complaints turned up the truth that Publish America is an "author mill", which makes its money from convincing authors to buy hundreds of copies and then make no effort to sell more. They have no standards of quality whatsoever, as proved by some enterprising liebusters who deliberately wrote the worst novel they could, complete with nonsensical pages of gobbledegook. There was no harm done. I learned a little more about life.

We did lose a little money when the Children's Literary Agency agreed to represent me, and would submit Bite Me to various publishers for a small fee per mailing. It wasn't until we'd lost a hundred or so dollars with no results that it occurred to me that they could very likely not be submitting anything at all, and that a real literary agent wouldn't demand money up front. I still haven't told my mother, who spotted the fees, because I don't think it would do anything other than upset her. At least they let me terminate the relationship without getting nasty and demanding compensation.

So that's my limited experience with snake-oil sales. If any gentle readers have had similar travails, feel free to share them in the comments.