Is Lulu a vanity publisher?
Continuing this thread: forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=1714" target="_blank">http://veinglory.8.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=1714 kmfrontain wrote: "Believe it or not, there are traditionalists even in self-publishing." Oh, I believe it. Hopefully most of them are more tolerant than the lot you encountered. There's prejudice on the other side as well: self-publishing folks who chose the POD route and make contemptuous remarks about people who have a garage full of unsold books. Some people just like to look down their nose at anyone who did things a different way than they did. It's the "My religion is good so yours must be bad" principle. "Many of them wouldn't listen and insisted Lulu was another form of vanity publishing, despite that I repeated over and over that I paid nothing up front to get published." First of all, it sounds as though this crowd doesn't know the difference between vanity publishing, subsidy publishing, and self-publishing. If anyone else here isn't clear about the differences, here's a handy article from the SFWA about it: http://www.sfwa.org/beware/vanitypublishers.html As far as I can tell, the term "vanity" doesn't have to do with procedure - it has to do with how a company presents itself. If someone says they're a pubisher and then asks you to pay a fee for printing, they're a vanity publisher (or, if they offer certain services for free, they're a subsidy publisher). If someone says they're a print company and then asks you to pay a fee for printing, they're a print company. Lulu doesn't claim to be a publisher. Therefore it's not a vanity publisher. There are subtleties to the Lulu situation, however. Let's start with the simplest situation: You sell your book through Lulu's Website. Lulu takes a cut of the profit and you keep the rest. You pay no fees to Lulu for this. That's no different from those traditionalists paying their local printer to print books. One way or another, a printer is going to want money for the work he does, surprise, surprise. However, if you buy one of Lulu's distribution packages, the situation is somewhat different. One of the traditional markers of who the publisher is, is who owns the ISBN. If you'll look at your ISBN, the 14116 on it says that Lulu is the publisher. I understand that there's a POD company in Britain, Publish And Be Damned, that registers the ISBNs in the names of the authors. I don't know how it handles orders, though, because the ISBN is what routes book orders - if somebody sends an order for a book whose ISBN starts with 14116, then the order goes to Lulu. Lulu *does* allow you to put your own ISBN on your book: http://www.lulu.com/help/node/view/153#ownisbn However, as it says, if you put your own ISBN on the book, the Lulu network isn't set up in such a way that it can register your books with online bookstores. Now, what does this all mean in terms of whether Lulu is a vanity publisher? Well, it means that Lulu breaks the mold. There's no precedent for this type of thing - an author paying a fee for distribution and giving the company the privilege of being the publisher on record, but the company resolutely refusing to call itself a publisher. My guess is that, as time goes on, the ISBN will cease to be associated with who the publisher is and will instead become associated with who the distributor is. An important distinction, but for now there's likely to remain confusion. veinglory wrote: "I would want some guidlines and definitions (POD, vanity etc) set" I think the fact is that the definition of self-publishing is in flux at the moment. I don't have any problems with people discussing vanity publishing and subsidy publishing here - in fact, discussions of self-publishing will inevitably touch on those topics, if only to figure out what the difference is. Vanity publishing and subsidy publishing both have bad names because of the horrendous abuses to authors that have taken place in those areas. But if authors go into the situation with their eyes open, knowing what they're letting themselves into, I don't see any problems. Subsidy publishing in particular is linked with a lot of respectable publishers, such as academic journals.

The definitions from SFWA would indicate that Lulu has crossed the lines and come out as a new thing. Like a vanity press, Lulu will publish anything, even crap, because Lulu staff don't take a look at the pre-published product, or the finished product, in terms of format, artwork, and actual written work. All of that must be fixed beforehand, either by the author, or someone that author pays to do it. But Lulu doesn't charge a publishing fee, so Lulu isn't a "traditional" vanity publisher. From the company perspecitve, a piece of crap on their site is just taking up space on their hard drives. But of course, they will get a print fee from the author if he buys any galleys of his disaster. Naturally, I think Lulu would rather have a winner in their hard drives, as this will utlimately bring them more income, but it doesnt hurt them to keep a piece of crap on file. The reason I chose Lulu was the lack of upfront costs. I could have a book published and only ever sell it as an ebook if I wanted, and never pay a distribution fee to get an ISBN. In my case, I took the basic ISBN for the first books of Bound and of Gryphon, but only because I wanted the ISBN to get on websites that wouldn't look at a book without one. None of the other books have an ISBN yet. I can't afford the international fee that I should buy. This would get my books in Amazon internationally, and also on another key online bookstore, I forget the name. So for under 100$ US in distribution charges for basic ISBN, I have two books with ISBNs, but six books available on line, all as ebooks or softcovers. I also have the possibility of making hardcovers if I want, and of publishing other novels in the series, and without adding any more fees than I want to pay. If I fail to prosper, it's due to my lack of promotion or (save me!) my work is an example of some of the crap they are keeping on file. From my viewpoint, I've bypassed the opinion of editors that can say no to my ever publishing and put my success in the hands of readers, where I think it should be.

"Like a vanity press, Lulu will publish anything, even crap" So will your local Kinko's. :) I think that is what Lulu is modelling itself after, not vanity presses. But of course it does borrow the idea from some vanity and subsidy publishers of providing distribution and ISBNs to authors. So, as we're both saying, it really doesn't fit any previous business model. It will be interesting to see whether the example of Lulu and Café Press changes the state self-publishing. While there will always be authors who want their hands held through the whole process of self-publication, I'm guessing that more and more authors will want to forfeit the high fees of other printing-and-distribution companies aimed at self-publishers. The other side of this is that I never would have considered self-publishing if I'd had to pay hundreds of dollars up front, and I gather that's the case with you as well. So more authors are likely to take the self-publishing route. "From my viewpoint, I've bypassed the opinion of editors that can say no to my ever publishing and put my success in the hands of readers, where I think it should be." I agree, but we still have the problem of how to weed out the good writing from the bad. Nifty and FanFiction.net shows how serious that problem can get. :) Lots of review sites are already complaining that they don't want to deal with a massive influx of self-published books that have undergone no editorial gateway prior to publication. So I suspect that what is going to develop is something similar to the fanfic betas and the writing group critiques - people will be offering editorial services before publication, and then those editorial services will be acknowledged within the books, so that the reader and reviewer can judge whether the book has at least had somebody check to make sure there weren't a zillion typos. The difference between this and the traditional publishing model is that the author will have final say on any changes made. Which may not always be a good thing. :) But I think it's better than the alternative (and I say this as an editor as well as an author). The other difference, of course, is that the author chooses whether to be published or not. And that's a giant, giant difference, because, until now, only a very small percentage of authors have been published anywhere except on the Web. Editors - looking at distaste at the gunk in their slush piles - often say that everyone who's good ultimately gets published, but I don't think they're taking into account (1) how much time and energy it takes for good writers to get published, (2) the fact that even skilled, published writers may get rejection letters for reasons unrelated to the quality of their writing. And then there are the bad writers who want to get published. We'll just pray it's not us. :) But, like you, I have faith in the readers to decide such matters. Dusk (who just got a bad beta report, which is proof that there are alternative ways to weed out the bad stories)