A rose by any other name ...

Publishers Weekly reports on Harlequin Horizons' name change to DellArte Press.

The thing that irks me slightly about the article is that it makes it look as if the RWA yanked Harlequin's credentials because they started a self-publishing arm, whereas, in fact, to the best of my knowledge, the RWA does not object to self-publishing. What they object to--what they objected to in Harlequin's case--is vanity publishing. (SFWA's statement makes this explicit.)

It is possible that the difference between these two things is not self-evident. So, if you are confused, allow me to offer a crash course.

The standard publishing model, the model under which I have published books with Ace, Prime, and Tor, goes like this: publisher pays author for the right to print their book. Revenue earned from book is shared between publisher and author, once the advance has earned out.*

Self-publishing is when an author chooses to publish a book him- or herself. That means the author pays to have the book printed and bound; the author pays for cover art, if any; the author does whatever marketing there is; the author tries to get the book in bookstores. Also, the author does the editing and copy-editing and all the rest of it. The author does all the work; the author pays all the expenses; the author gets all the money from the sale of the book. It's called self-publishing because there is no publisher involved. Just the author and a service like Lulu.com. (Notice that Lulu.com, which offers services like editing and cover design, does not anywhere describe itself as a publisher. They are making money off self-publishing, but they aren't pretending that having Lulu Books on the spine would mean a damn thing.)

[ETA: I realize in looking at this post again that it may not be transparently obvious what I mean by "publisher," and since this is one of the confusions on which vanity press scam-artists prey, let me clarify my meaning. A publisher--like for example Ace Books or Tor Books or DAW Books, or for example Small Beer Press or Night Shade Books or Subterranean Press--is a company whose business is printing and selling books. Authors are content-providers (or vendors to the publisher, as fidelioscabinet remarks in the comments); the publisher produces the tangible object which contains the intangible story provided by the author, and makes their money by, in turn, selling that product to the next link in the chain, the bookstores. Lulu.com is not a publisher because their business is not to sell the finished books to a third party; They are selling the finished book to the author. And they're not a vanity press because, well, because they don't claim to be a publisher, and because they don't charge you extra to put Lulu Books on the spine. Publishers sell your books to other people. Vanity presses sell your books to you.]

Vanity publishing is where an author pays a publisher to print their book. In theory, the payment includes or can include editing, copy-editing, packaging, and possibly even marketing and distribution, but these may also be more or less sketchy because--and here is the sticking point--vanity publishing is frequently a scam. (I don't say always because I don't know for a fact that all vanity publishers are scam-artists. But I know that it very frequently turns out that they are.) The central objection to Harlequin Horizons (as Jackie Kessler explains in detail) is that it is scamming aspiring authors into believing that paying Harlequin to publish their book is almost as good as being paid by Harlequin to publish their book. It is trying to convince aspiring authors that the form of being published (i.e., having your novel printed as a "real book" with formatting and binding and, as for example, DellArte Press on the spine) is (a.) indistinguishable from the actuality of being published (with advances and marketing and distribution) and (b.) something you should have to pay for.

And no. It's not.

Now, if you have written a novel or a treatise on horsemanship in the American Civil War, or if your Cousin Norbert has written a history of the family, or your Aunt Marilyn has put together a book of all your grandmother and great-grandmother's incredible pie recipes, and you want to have that novel or treatise or history or recipe book printed up as a "real book" with enough copies so that everyone in the family can have one, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with paying a publishing service, or even a vanity press, to do that for you. You know what you're paying for, and you're getting what you're paying for. Likewise, if you have a novel and you want to self-publish, knowing what kind of back-breaking work you're in for if you want to sell more than the ten copies to family and friends that we could probably all sell ...

[Ahem. Sorry. Girl Scout Cookie sales flashback. I'll be all right in a minute.]

Essentially, if you know what you're in for and you want to do it, more power to you.

Vanity publishing is a scam because it's trying to pretend that what authors are paying it for is the same thing that standard publishers pay authors for, which (a.) is not true and (b.) is wrong even if it were true. The rule of thumb here, as always in publishing, is that money flows toward the author. Anyone who comes to you and says they'll publish you if you pay them is trying to scam you. (Yes, Harlequin Horizons DellArte Press, I am still looking at you. Unless Harlequin is going to stop referring people to its vanity subsidiary in its rejection letters--which I did not notice them promising anywhere.)

That is what RWA and SFWA and MWA are objecting to and that is why what Harlequin is doing is reprehensible.



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*Basically, when a publisher buys a book, they are betting that they will make at least $X on it--$X being the amount of the advance they pay the author. When the book makes $X, that's called "earning out." After this magical event has occurred, authors begin receiving royalties--but remember, the publisher paid them BEFORE the book began to earn money.

And sometimes the book doesn't make $X. Of my books, only Mélusine, The Bone Key, and A Companion to Wolves have, as of this writing, earned out. That is the risk the publisher takes.