What percentage of authors pay a vanity press to get their first book published?”
A vanity press or vanity publisher is a publishing house that publishes books at the author’s expense.[1] Publisher Johnathon Clifford claims to have coined the term in 1959.[2] According to the US National Endowment for the Arts, “For the purposes of this category, a vanity press is defined as one that does any of the following: requires individual writers to pay for part or all of the publication costs; asks writers to buy or sell copies of the publication; publishes the work of anyone who subscribes to the publication or joins the organization through membership fees; publishes the work of anyone who buys an advertisement in the publication; publishes work without competitive selection; or publishes work without professional editing.”[3] A vanity press will generally agree to print and bind any author’s work if the author is willing to pay for the service; these fees typically form a vanity press’s profits. In contrast, commercial publishers, whether major companies or small presses
