Evanston Publishing is not a vanity or subsidy publisher. We are a specialty production house and offer as much or as little as a self-publisher or publishing company needs to publish a book. When you self-publish a book with us, you own all the rights to the book and you are in control. Our prices are based on the production work you need done and the number of books you have printed, not how much you plan to charge for the book.

A vanity or subsidy publisher may have you pay all the costs in producing and marketing the book,
yet retains control of your book by keeping the copyright. Companies such as AuthorHouse, Xlibris, iUniverse, and Dorrance, expect to either own the copyright for the book, or promise to pay for some of the printing costs if the book has good sales (but do not tell you what constitutes “good sales”).

For example, one company that advertises heavily on the Internet claims it only charges $99. When you read their contract, you find out that price is for one book. For additional books, they charge 60% of the retail cost of the book, the retail cost being what you plan to charge buyers. Say you have a book that will retail for $20 and you want 100 copies. The cost to you is $1,287 ($99 plus $12 per remaining 99 books), or $12.87 per book, if there are no additional costs tacked on to the bill, such as "disk" fees.

If you plan on selling this book to bookstores and/or wholesalers, who take a 40 to 55 percent discount, you can lose 115 percent on each book—that is if you can sell these books yourself, since these companies often take over all rights to your book. They also decide what the book cover will look like and how the book will be edited, if it is edited at all. They promise to market the book, but their marketing is no different than what every self-publishing packager automatically gives you—access to their web site, and the name of the book placed with wholesalers and on-line bookstores.

Every one of these companies that we have researched is not a self-publishing packager, but simply a vanity or subsidy press using more sophisticated advertising than the older vanity/subsidy presses, which also used to claim they would market your books for you and give you a royalty on what they sold. As everyone in the publishing business knows, the word “royalty” means that payments are made for books that the publisher pays for, not the author. For you to get a “royalty” from one of these companies means you are paying yourself for your own book.

Here are some key questions to help you determine if a company is a vanity/subsidy press:

1. Who retains the rights to the book, you or the publisher? Who owns the copyright?
2. Who decides how the cover and text should be designed, you or the publisher?
3. How are the printing costs determined, by quantity printed or the retail price of the book?
4. Who has the final say in the editing, you or the publisher?
5. Who decides how the book is marketed, you or the publisher?
6. Is there an extra "set-up" fee? Is there a pre-purchase or pre-sale requirement?
7. Do they offer you a "royalty" on a book you are paying to have printed?
8. Do they state or imply that you will make a profit on the book?
9. Do they make promises that are not included in their contract?

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