: Re: What's the distinction between "vanity publishing" and "self publishing"? This question came up on the pros and cons of publishing avenues question; when I tried to look it up, I found the results

@Cugini967

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What you're observing is a sea change in values and perceptions in the publishing industry, which has caused the distinction between "vanity publishing" and "self-publishing" to become very murky. This is important because "vanity publishing" did and does carry a heavy stigma, while "self-publishing" is on the road to respectability.

Until pretty recently, anyone taking your money to publish your book was a vanity publisher. Vanity publishers were all scams, in that they took your money on the (implicit) promise that you had a chance to make it back from book sales, but in practice no one ever did. Furthermore, the vanity publisher had no interest in helping you sell your book, because they got their money from bilking the authors, not from selling books.

Self-publishing, meanwhile, was about equally likely to fail, but as there was no middle-man the people who tried it were merely fools, not victims of a scam.

In the past ~5 years, mostly due to the rise of e-books, self-publishing has become a plausible path to success. Lots of people are making small but respectable sums e-publishing, and a handful of people have made it big. As a result, we're now seeing "self-publishing services" which attempt to help people self-publish by doing some or all of the work that "pure" self-publishers have to do for themselves. And here's where it gets complicated: strictly speaking the business model of the self-publishing services is identical to the business model of the vanity press. But the self-publishing services desperately want to be seen as part of the legitimate self-publishing ecosystem, and not as another scam.

So the terminological confusion that you're seeing is due to self-publishing services and the people who use them trying to disassociate themselves from the old vanity publishers. However, your basic observation is correct: there is no hard line between self-publication services and vanity presses.

That said, I think there is a significant difference between the presentation and implicit promises made to the author between these two groups. A classic vanity publisher pretends to actually be a publisher, as in an entity that actually makes its money from selling books. There existed the impression—disavowed in the fine print, of course—that your book would be professionally edited, that the publisher could actually get your book into stores, that your book would be "published" in the usual sense. Honest self-publication services do not claim to be publishers, and are very forthright about the set of services they're offering (cover design, typesetting, etc.) and more importantly what they're not offering (marketing, placement in brick-and-mortar stores, etc.)

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