I’ll publish right or wrong. Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.
- Lord Byron

Let me quote from an article by Paula Span in the Washington Post: “Like mainstream book publishers, self-publishing companies are in the business of selling dreams. But what if the dream becomes a nightmare?”

If you are interested in the bizarre world of writing and self-publishing, I strongly recommend reading this article (even though it was published already in 2005). It confirms what I have learned through several years of being in the business: The self-publishing world is a shark tank!

Just recently I looked into the practices of another vanity publisher, namely PublishAmerica, a company Paula Span mentions in her article. In fact, I found the article during my research on PublishAmerica. As a business man in the publishing industry I was puzzled by PublishAmerica’s business model. On the surface they act like a vanity publisher providing services for aspiring writers, but like traditional publishers they don’t charge for their services. They pride themselves with offering literally tens of thousands of works of literature including distribution through Amazon.Com, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and more. According to their website they sell a book about every sixteen seconds.

The paradox starts with the fact that they freely accept anything written without applying an editing process to the manuscript itself or even the synopsis. The experienced writer, literary agent, or publisher will recognize a badly written work immediately by reading a badly written synopsis, and PublishAmerica publishes a great number of low-quality literature. Add to this the amazingly high list price per book. For instance, a 202 pages adventure book in 5.5″ x 8.8″ size is offered for $19.95 for the paperback version (Printing costs are less than $4). This kind of pricing model immediately kills any chances of success for the author. This, and looking at some of their awful cover designs, made me wonder how PublishAmerica can possibly create any profit, let alone selling a book every sixteen seconds.

The answer to that question is easy: PublishAmerica’s income is not created through sales with regular readers, but mainly through the thousands of authors they published. These are mainly authors who try to take destiny in their own hands by selling the books directly (to friends and family). Applying simple math and assuming that their claim of one sold book every sixteen seconds is correct, PublishAmerica sells roughly 160,000 books a month! Take this with a $10 average profit per book, and they make $1.6M a month, or almost $20M a year. And that’s gross profit, not sales volume.

Whether or not their claim of sales success is true, the business model now makes sense. PublishAmerica freely accepts anybody who submits a manuscript. I know out of experience that processing a manuscript (without editing), creating a pre-fabricated cover, and submitting the book to Ingram (that’s where every self-publishing company goes) is a matter of maybe an hour or two for somebody who does this kind of work on a daily basis and who doesn’t take any pride in his work. The sales volume is created through the vast number of publications they offer in combination with an outrageous profit margin.

Unfortunately, the great success of PublishAmerica is a lose-lose-situation for the authors. They have no chance of being recognized for the hard work it took to write the book, and, after all, they are tagged with a red flag by traditional publishers, meaning authors who use a publication with PublishAmerica as a reference will be rejected in a New York second. That’s just how the industry works.