How to spot a vanity press

Updated August 2026

The phrase "vanity press" gets used loosely, usually to mean "any company an author paid". That definition is useless, because paying for editing and design is simply what self-publishing costs. Under it, every legitimate service company is a vanity press and the term tells you nothing.

There is a real distinction, and it is structural rather than financial.

The structural test

The last row is the whole thing. A vanity press is not defined by charging money — it is defined by selling the feeling of having been chosen, to someone who was not chosen, while keeping rights it has no use for.

The seven signs

1. Manufactured selectivity

An "acceptance letter" for a manuscript nobody read. Language about your work having been "selected" or "approved by our editorial board", arriving days after you enquired. Real acquisition takes months and usually ends in rejection; approval that fast is a sales step wearing a costume.

2. They become the publisher of record

Check any book they have produced on Amazon and look at the publisher field. If their name is there instead of the author's imprint, the author does not control that edition — they cannot move it to another printer, change the price freely, or take it with them.

3. Rights that do not come back

A contract that takes rights with no reversion clause, or ties them to a term that never clearly ends, or claims first refusal on your next book. Nobody needs any of that to lay out a paperback.

4. Round numbers with no itemisation

A single package fee and no breakdown. There is no way to tell whether you are buying a developmental edit or a spellcheck, and no way to compare two quotes. Ask for the itemised version; the reaction is the answer.

5. Marketing that cannot be measured

The highest-margin thing sold in this industry. "Press release distribution", "social media campaign", "Amazon optimisation" — none of it means anything without numbers: how many, to whom, measured how, reported when. Vague marketing packages are where most of the money goes and most of the disappointment comes from.

6. Urgency

A discount expiring Friday. A production slot about to go. Real editorial schedules are booked months out and nobody loses a slot because you took a weekend to think.

7. Unverifiable proof

Client books they will not name. Awards nobody has heard of. Reviews that read alike, arrived in a burst, or sit on a site that resembles a review platform without being one — check the domain character by character, because lookalikes exist and are used deliberately.

Where to check specific companies

We are not going to name companies as vanity presses. We compete with several of them, which makes us the wrong source for that judgement, and you should be suspicious of any company that does it about its rivals.

Independent watchdogs exist for exactly this, they have no commercial stake, and they are better at it than we would be:

• Writer Beware — run under the auspices of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, tracking publishing schemes for over two decades. The first place to search a company name.
• The Alliance of Independent Authors maintains a services watchdog rating self-publishing companies against a published code of standards.
• Absolute Write Water Cooler — a long-running forum where authors post detailed first-hand accounts of specific companies.
• Your state business registry, for who owns a company and what else they have run.

Search the company name on the first three before paying anyone. It takes ten minutes and it is the single highest-value thing in this guide.

A note on the largest example

Author Solutions is the company most often discussed in this context. It operates a number of imprints including AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Xlibris, Trafford, Archway and Balboa Press, and was bought by Penguin in 2012 for a reported $116 million.

Authors brought class-action lawsuits alleging deceptive practices. Those suits were dismissed in 2015 — there was no finding of wrongdoing and no settlement, and it matters to say so accurately. Extensive author complaints are nonetheless documented publicly by Writer Beware and others, and the imprints continue to operate.

We raise it because the ownership structure is the genuinely useful fact: several brand names an author might treat as separate options belong to one company. Check who owns a company before treating two quotes as independent.

If you have already paid

1. Stop authorising further work and put every concern in writing by email.
2. Re-read the contract for the termination and rights clauses specifically.
3. Ask in writing for the rights reversion and the source files.
4. If you paid by card, ask your bank about a chargeback — there are time limits, so ask early.
5. File with your state Attorney General. Individual complaints rarely produce individual remedies, but volume against one company is what triggers action.
6. Post a factual, unemotional account somewhere public. It is how the next author finds out.