The Vanity Publisher - Part I

Due to the popularity of my last retaliation towards the vanity publishing industry, here’s another one from deep in my files. The story behind this one is that, once again, a certain press of dubious nature sent me the offer of a free thesaurus if I would submit a manuscript (a ploy no real publisher would ever do). Quite tired of the game being played, I must admit I went into a bit of a frenzy and mailed this back, scribbling it down rather hastily and taking no time for revisions.

Needless to say, I never received my thesaurus.

I will be posting this in parts over this week. Here is part 1 of The Subsidy Publisher…

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THE VANITY PUBLISHER

This is the terrible and sorrowful story of a subsidy publisher, who made its business from feeding off of starving authors, and one day received its due justice. Though you may not know what a subsidy publisher is, every author worth his salt does, though they will usually call it a vanity publisher. If you are not an author, you may imagine a piranha or a dragon in the place of a subsidy publisher if that makes it easier.

One day, a very poor author received something in the mail, and he was so hungry that he nibbled on the edges of the envelope. Many authors do not make much money until they write a bestseller: this author was indeed the poorest of them all. He had been writing and writing on one book, polishing and changing, and doing the things that authors do, hoping that one day he could send it to an editor, who would publish it. This author, seeing the envelope, wondered why anyone would want to contact him, and when he saw the name ‘V—–e Press‘ next to the name of the sender, he almost fell dead on the spot. He rushed into his popsicle-stick house and opened the letter in haste, to find that, indeed, a publisher was contacting him, even though he hadn’t sent his book off! What luck! he cried, and he immediately packaged his half-finished manuscript and sent it off to the publisher.

But, you see, this author was not worth his salt. He had not really noticed that the publisher was a subsidy publisher. In fact, he did not even know what it was. He was not the smartest man in the world, either, which should be obvious by now.

When the manuscript arrived at the subsidy publisher’s offices in Pennsylvania, the whole office erupted into uproar.

“Look at this!” the head editor shouted, waving the pages of the manuscript. “A manuscript! Quick, Abnar! Joheezeth! Abednego! Kill the fatted calf, and we shall feast at our good fortune!”

They feasted and feasted for two weeks straight, with the main course being the pages of the manuscript, which they ate mercilessly like it was slices of bologna, with neither napkin nor fork.

“Scrumptious!” the head editor said at the end of the feast. “Now we tell him we accepted it, and send him back the Contract of Never-ending and Always Outrageous Fees!”

When the author received this form, he was so happy to finally be an author that he signed it without reading it, for it was eighteen hundred pages long. And here is where the story gets terrible and woeful. He then sent another copy of his manuscript to the subsidy publisher, and they in turn made three-hundred and one photocopies at their local copy shop, on heavy paper with full color ink, and lamination on each page. They then charged the author for such, so that he had to sell his popsicle stick house, and move on to living inside an open-air home, which is a fancy term for living in the park. Then, the subsidy publishers devoured two-hundred and ninety-nine of the copies, and stored one away for later, and then charged the author a storage fee for its refrigeration.

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW