Hmmm...

Although their impact may be shrinking in an era of ebooks, vanity publishers can still be a very enticing trap for the unwary author. Unlike traditional publishing houses that either assume book production costs themselves or sometimes charge a portion of them against royalties, vanity presses take a fee from the author to print the book.

Depending on their level of investment in the business of publishing and the level of investment of the author in the process, the vanity press might proofread and edit the manuscript, or it might not. If they don't, then whatever typos or groaningly bad writing make up that manuscript are just transferred to the printed book.

A group of science fiction authors decided to use a "sting" manuscript to expose a vanity press that was claiming it was a real publishing house that only accepted quality submissions and then professionally processed them into books that met the industry standard. The group wrote the chapters in different voices with only bare outlines as to what to do and deliberately wrote them as amateurishly and awfully as possible. They left out a chapter and replaced it with a duplicate of an earlier chapter. They used a software program to generate one. Their collective pen name was "Travis Tea." In short, they made it as obvious as possible that they were not submitting a work that was ready for publication.

Their target, however, accepted it, only backing out when the group revealed their hoax and then claiming that the pre-production editing process had discovered the unpublishable manuscript was indeed unpublishable.

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the group had continued to push their plan as did the journalists who pulled off the Naked Came the Stranger prank in 1969. A columnist for Newsday decided that the American bestseller lists were dominated by work that was full of lurid sex scenes but had no actual literary worth or even skilled writing. Along with 24 colleagues, he produced the aforementioned work, which proved his point by selling 20,000 copies before the authors revealed their hoax and another 70,000 after that.

On the one hand, it's good to see folks who prey on unknowing would-be authors exposed for what they are. A state vanity press outfit once saw the old sermon blog and e-mailed me to suggest I publish the sermons and perhaps sell the books as a fundraiser for the church. The woman went so far as to quote me a price but backed off when I said that I had once worked for a newspaper and I was conditioned that the only checks involved in my writing would have my name in the "pay to the order of" line rather than the signature line.

But on the other hand, while the hoax explains the awful novel that the sting crew produced, we're still left with no explanation for all of the crap regular publishers shovel out into the world, and even less explanation for why people buy it.