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Publishing house in which authors pay to have their books published

A vanity press or vanity publisher, sometimes also subsidy publisher, is a publishing house where the author pays to have the book published, and signs a restrictive contract which involves surrendering significant rights. It is not to be confused with hybrid publishing, where the publisher and author collaborate and share costs and risks, or with assisted self publishing, where the author pays publishing services to assist with self publishing his own book, and retains all rights.

Mainstream publishers never charge authors to publish their books; the publisher bears all the risks of publication and pays all the costs. Because of that financial risk, mainstream publishers are extremely selective in what they will publish, and reject most manuscripts submitted to them. The high level of rejection is why some authors publish with vanity presses. James D. Macdonald says, "Money should always flow towards the author", a concept sometimes called Yog's Law.

Hybrid publishing is the source of debate in the publishing industry, with some viewing hybrid publishers as vanity presses in disguise. However, a true hybrid publisher is selective in what they publish and will share the costs (and therefore the risks) with the author, whereas with a vanity press, the author pays the full cost of production and therefore carries all the risk. The vanity press has absolutely no interest in whether the book is saleable or suitable for publication. Given the bad reputation of vanity publishing, many vanity presses are rebranding themselves as hybrids, leading to exploitation of writers. The Society of Authors (SoA) and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) have called for reform of the hybrid/paid for publishing sector. Trade unions representing 14,800 authors jointly published a report to expose widespread bad practices among companies that charge writers to publish their work while taking away their rights.

It is often stated that many famous authors, such as Mark Twain and Jane Austen, have used vanity publishers. This is incorrect and confuses self publishing with vanity publishing. In a variant of Yog's law for self publishing, author John Scalzi has proposed an alternate definition to distinguish self publishing from vanity publishing: "While in the process of self publishing, money and rights are controlled by the writer." Self publishing is distinguished from vanity publishing by the writer maintaining control of copyright as well as the editorial and publishing process, including marketing and distribution.

Vanity presses often engage in deceptive practices or offer costly, poor quality services with limited recourse available to the writer. In the US, these practices have been cited by the Better Business Bureau as unfavorable reports by consumers. One common scam is when a vanity press pretends to operate a traditional publishing arm, where the publishing house bears the full cost. However, when an author submits his work, he is told it does not quite meet the standards required for traditional publishing, but that the company will still publish it if the author pays for something—engaging their professional editor, committing to buying a large number of copies of the book, or another similar excuse. In reality, the exorbitant fee charged for these services will fully cover the vanity publisher's costs for producing the book. Such a scam is a plot point in Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum.

The vanity press model exists for other media such as videos, music and photography. A notable example is ARK Music Factory, which, for a fee, produced and released Rebecca Black's 2011 viral video "Friday". Vanity academic journals also exist, often called predatory journals, which publish with little or no editorial oversight, although they may claim to be peer reviewed. One such predatory journal, the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, accepted for publication a paper called Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List consisting of the sentence "Get me off your fucking mailing list." repeated many times. Vanity photography magazines often have little or no physical circulation, relying instead on the submitting photographers buying the magazine after publication. Some also charge a submission fee. Magazines such as Lucy's, Jute, and Pump – all managed by parent publisher Kavyar – often accept photograph submissions for free, or for a minimal fee to be featured on a magazine cover.

The term vanity press appeared in mainstream U. S. publications as early as 1941. In that year, C. M. Flumiani was sentenced to 18 months in a US prison for mail fraud, arising from his scheme that promised book promotion (a line in a catalog), expert editing (they accepted all books), and acting as agent bringing books to his own publishing houses. Ernest Vincent Wright, author of the 1939 novel Gadsby, written entirely in lipogram, was unable to find a publisher for his work and ultimately chose to publish it through a vanity press.