POD Practices, Part 2: Who Wants It All?
Last post, I attributed booksellers’ reluctance to order publish/print-on-demand titles to a misconception that “POD” equals “vanity.” But, you may be wondering, what’s so wrong with that? Given a vanity press that contracted with the big distributors and offered bookstores discounts and returns, what objection is left?
A big objection, that’s what: Lack of editorial review.
Vanity presses move the slush pile off the editor’s desk and into the sales catalog. No one reads slush unless they’re paid to (or unless they’re aficionados of fan-fiction, but we won’t go there tonight). Why buy it?
(”Slush” is the collective noun for unsolicited submissions. The writer thinks it’s good enough to publish, but no one has yet agreed with her about that.)
Booksellers, and legitimate commercial publishers, know that their reputation is bound up with the quality of product they sell. Try to pass off bad writing to a reader as though it were saleable fiction, you’ll find that reader avoiding your books in the future. (And you may think that, say, The Da Vinci Code is bad writing, but I assure you that the stuff that got rejection letters on the day Dan Brown’s agent got the good news was far, far worse.) So booksellers are going to avoid buying anything from a vanity press–or from anything they think is a vanity press.
Now, sometimes a dishonest vanity press will pretend to be something it’s not. PublishAmerica is as usual a good example of this. They claim to reject the majority of their submissions, but it just ain’t so. Need proof? Check out the stories behind these titles: Atlanta Nights. Eli Smith and the Purple Pony. Crack of Death. Also, a former PA employee recounts having to get supervisor approval to reject a manuscript. Says they,
I finally quit after I was told my quotas for accepting manuscripts weren’t high enough and that my supervisors worried I was stressing quality over quantity. In publishing! What a notion! (Except they were careful to say they didn’t have quotas. They just had “certain numbers you should be meeting daily.” Which of course is DIFFERENT from a quota, because of the spelling.)
Another vanity pretending to be otherwise is Poetry.com, aka The International Library of Poetry (ILP). Exactly what kind of contest is this where everyone wins? And is published in the big pricey anthology? Which all entrants are pressured to buy? The pudding containing the proof of Poetry.com’s perfidiousness is The Wocky Jivvy, a collection of very, very, very bad poetry created in the hopes that the ILP would reject them. (Teresa Nielsen Hayden finally earned the coveted rejection–by adding line breaks to the Nigerian Scam.) You can even win prizes for amusingly bad poetry submitted to Poetry.com, and win actual cash for it! Not to worry; the Wergle Flomp contest (named for the pseudonym under which David Taub submitted his semi-finalist certified poem “Flubblebop“) is on the up-and-up.
No bookstore wants to end up with shelves and shelves of Wocky Jivvies and Purple Ponies. If they sell a vanity published book at all, it’s only because a customer actually came in and special-ordered the darn thing with money up front. And many will refuse to do even that, especially after that whole Author Identity Publishing thing (summary: editor of vanity-published anthology special-orders a copy here and a copy there, more than a thousand in all, using a fake name and credit card).
What this has to do with POD publishers is, most vanity presses these days use POD technology, as they’re all about maximizing their own profits while minimizing their costs. Any honest POD press with high editorial standards and bookstore-friendly business practices who would go to the efforts necessary to win booksellers’ trust and restore POD’s reputation is to be applauded.
April 30th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Thanks for Atlanta Nights. It made me feel better about most of my stuff…with possible exceptions of stuff I wrote in high school. Of course, I was in high school. At least I have that excuse.
April 30th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
As I understand it, there are actually English teachers and writing teachers out there who have begun using Atlanta Nights as a lesson in what not to do. (I doubt they do much of that with chapter 34, however.)
Glad you like!
December 17th, 2011 at 8:00 pm
The new Zune browser is surprisingly good, but not as good as the iPod’s. It works well, but isn’t as fast as Safari, and has a clunkier interface. If you occasionally plan on using the web browser that’s not an issue, but if you’re planning to browse the web alot from your PMP then the iPod’s larger screen and better browser may be important.