Should authors pay to get published?

Whatever your motive for getting published. I suppose there has to be a little vanity in all of us in believing that we have something to say that others might find interesting. However, Vanity Publishing is a whole area of the publishing industry that has not had a good press.

Vanity Publishing is where you, the author, simply pay another organisation to publish your book for you. These organisations are not cheap to use and authors can spend may thousands of pounds for “help, advice, and know how”.

There is a lot of ego massaging, but at the end of the day, you end up with a lot of promises about marketing, garage full of books and a gaping chasm where your savings used to be.

Now, I am not saying that all such organisations are bad, but if your objective is to get a realistic return for your personal investment of time and also realising the true value of your intellectual property, then it is difficult to see how that could be achieved when the actual cost of each copy of your book is vastly more than the cover price. In my world that is called a loss, and a bad business venture. So, the question is should an author pay to get published?

If you are treating your book as a proper business venture then there are two sides to your balance sheet. Income and expenditure. Nobody owes you a living and if you want to make money from any business, you have to invest first.

You have already invested you time in writing, and there is no reason why this should not be shown on your balance sheet. But the final link in the chain to turn this into money, is the physical task of getting it typeset and printed. Print on Demand is the most cost effective way of achieving this, because you only ever print the books that you have a ready buyer waiting to purchase.