Money Makes Money

The average vanity press is a high-priced way to get a hard copy of your verbiage into your hands. Authors who search the Internet for advice will discover that self-publication is rarely the way to go.

C. Ben Bosah didn't do any Google searches on the publishing industry, vanity or traditional. A brainy engineer, he put together his own business model so that he could get his wife's brilliant non-fiction book into the marketplace. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the man did it all wrong, but the same article puts paid to the initial argument.

Mr. Bosah believed strongly in the self-help book that his wife, a gynecologist, put together. He titled it Letters to My Sisters, making his first mistake by seemingly targeting black women. White women have gynecological issues, too, but they'd not look at a book for black women, the WSJ implied. Hence, a large chunk of the book's market was lost.

Next, Mr. Bosah skipped the whole literary agent - publisher route, figuring that if he did it all himself he could keep all the profits. And the book was so good, there were sure to be massive profits. Wisely, Mr. Bosah had Letters published by a book manufacturing company, which is the cheapest way to get something with respectable quality. He even ordered a huge number of copies, knowing that the book would fly off the shelves, but aware that he got a volume discount so that the book could be priced within range of any other trade paperback.

Oops, no distributor, Mr. Bosah quickly realized. That's where the big publishing houses have it over all the rest. If you get published by HarperCollins, they'll get your work into brick and mortar stores. Mr. Bosah was therefore left to do it on his own -- with a stock of over 15,000 copies to push.

Through persistence, he linked up with a distributor who got the book into Borders, and then the missus won an award from the Independent Book Publishers Association which generated a bit of a buzz. He claims that he's managed to recoup his $40,000 investment. At $16.95 per copy, that's just over 2,300 books sold on-line or door-to-door, along with a boost from a presence in a real book store.

Assuming that the would-be author has plenty of time on their hands to do their own promotion, and that they have a spacious garage in which to store boxes and boxes of books, it would be possible to get published without going through the usual channels. The key is, said author would have to working in non-fiction (easier to sell) and would have to have a nice pile of cash to seed their personal publishing house. Didn't they always tell you that it takes money to make money? Or in the case of self-publishing, it takes money to break even.