Oh boy. Townhall Press. [rolls eyes] This’ll be worth a few days of blogging.

Townhall Press is a new publish-on-demand vanity press that isn’t calling itself a vanity press. That’s one of the ways you know they’re a scam.

“Now, wait a minute,” I hear you say, “are you calling them liars? If they don’t call themselves a vanity press, what right to you have to say otherwise?”

Good question! And as such, it deserves a good answer. Here’s a good answer: They act like a vanity press.

The business model of a vanity, or subsidy, press (Townhall, Publish America) is markedly different from that of a commercial publisher (Random House, Tor). Where the latter makes its money by selling books to the general reading public, the former makes its money by selling its publishing services to the writer.

Everything else follows from there. The relationship between a commercial publisher and an author is business-to-business in nature; the author is essentially a vendor selling the publisher an item for resale. But to a vanity publisher, the author is the customer. Authors pay for the privilege of seeing their work between book covers either by paying fees up front or by predictably buying huge numbers of their own book at inflated prices in hopes of selling them out of the trunks of their cars. And because the vanity press is only making money off the writer, they don’t care about the quality of the work. They’ll accept anything they can legally reproduce. Not so the commercial publisher, whose livelihood depends on selling books that people–people who have never met the author–will want to read.

So let’s see how Townhall Press stack up:

“Send us your manuscript today and within 90 days we’ll promote it on Townhall.com and Amazon.com in high-quality paperback or hardcover editions. Start today for as little as $999.”

Bingo. That $999? That’s where the publisher’s profit comes from. That “within 90 days” stuff? Guarantees that they accept anything. The entire web site, geared to attract authors? Proves that their target market is authors, not the general reading public. That’s all you need. The Townhall Press headquarters are in downtown Vanity Press City.

Vanity publishers have a legitimate reason to exist. They’re a great outlet for writers with very specialized subject matter and a guaranteed audience. If you’re giving a lecture at a local convention and you need a back-of-room product, or if you’re turning your mom’s personal recipe collection into a cookbook to distribute at the next big family reunion, considering a vanity press wouldn’t make you a chump. You don’t need bookstore placement. You just need publishing services.

However, vanity publishers who don’t admit to being vanity publishers, who in fact pretend to be just like the “big traditional publishing houses” only with more royalties and less rejection, vanity publishers who deliberately attempt to lure in authors who hope to get their books in bookstores around the country–these vanity publishers are lying liars who lie. They are scummy scammers who scam.

Townhall Press: The latest vanity scammer to come down the pike.

Nothing new here, really. Except that there is. Townhall Press aren’t just targeting authors. They’re targeting conservative authors. I’ll discuss why that’s interesting in my next post, so stay tuned.