>However, another side of the vanity publishing world is pretty scammy, basically promising writers and musicians and artists (generally ones with little commercial promise) 'a chance at success' by taking their money and doing things like this.
My wife’s mother is a lovely lady whose hobby is writing. I won’t say she’s particularly good at it, but hey, let a 60 year old lady do whatever makes her happy, right? Then one day she announced that she won a “contest” with one of her novels, and it’s going to be printed by a publisher! She was super pumped about the whole thing, but gradually it came to our knowledge that she’s gonna pay a substantial sum for this from her pension, because the “prize” was actually just a 50% “discount” on getting her book printed with this publisher…
Clearly, there was no real contest at all. This was just a vanity publisher preying on less sophisticated aspiring writers to part them from their money. It’s a complicated situation, because on one hand we didn’t want to ruin her happiness; on the other hand, she was clearly getting scammed badly… In the end we managed to convince her to go with the smallest possible quantity, which was of course then distributed mostly among family and friends.
My wife’s mother is a lovely lady whose hobby is writing. I won’t say she’s particularly good at it, but hey, let a 60 year old lady do whatever makes her happy, right? Then one day she announced that she won a “contest” with one of her novels, and it’s going to be printed by a publisher! She was super pumped about the whole thing, but gradually it came to our knowledge that she’s gonna pay a substantial sum for this from her pension, because the “prize” was actually just a 50% “discount” on getting her book printed with this publisher…
Clearly, there was no real contest at all. This was just a vanity publisher preying on less sophisticated aspiring writers to part them from their money. It’s a complicated situation, because on one hand we didn’t want to ruin her happiness; on the other hand, she was clearly getting scammed badly… In the end we managed to convince her to go with the smallest possible quantity, which was of course then distributed mostly among family and friends.
Very disgusting and sad practice.