Hello out there, I say with cupped hand to ear. Haven’t you figured it out yet? Why do you suppose our books are so overpriced? (I’ll probably get blacklisted for this—but truth will out.) Publish America is most certainly a vanity press, but with a Madison Avenue twist: a dollar advance and a contract (seven years). A contract and a binding advance, huh? That signals non-vanity press, right? Ok, the dollar didn’t send you into orbit but the contract was an immediate ego massage.

PA has invested in that very word, VANITY. It counts on you, your family, and your circle of friends buying the book at the exorbitant price. Any further sales is just gravy. When your book came out, do you remember how excited you were? Of course, you do. You were ecstatic. So, how many of you rushed to order 10, 20, 50, even 100 copies? Most of you, right? I don’t know what PA’s break even number is, but it’s not very high, because it costs them very little to produce a book.

Push the ego aside and look at the situation objectively—then get on with promoting your book.

1)     PA has very little invested in your book, since you did all the work in writing it and, yes, even editing it. If it needed heavy editing, it wouldn’t have been accepted in the first place. (Bubba and his treatise on night crawler ‘ketchin’ is just too costly to unsnarfle. It’s a sale lost but a major embarrassment and bad pub avoided.) They may scan your book for typos and misspellings but there are no major artistic changes made. In many cases, you even designed the cover. (A book cover can be designed and laid out ready for print by a professional in a couple of hours or less, even I can do it.) For the entire book, we’re only talking about a few hours work for PA since everything is done digitally on the computer. Ok, the book is formatted and the cover is ready.

2)     The book goes to a print-on-demand digital press where any number can be printed on the cheap, from one to the max. (This is another economy factor. There does not have to be a thousand-book press-run with hopes that the book sells, perhaps be left with a printing bill and 998 pads of toilet paper.) One hundred pound cover stock is less than ten cents per, and sixty pound bond paper & ink is less than, or right at two cents per page. A 300-page book will cost less than $4.50 to produce in materials and ink. If you have your calculator out, a 300-page book has only 150 actual sheets of paper since the print is on both sides.

My point: nobody has given you anything, big break or otherwise. You deserve to be in print; you wrote the book. You did the WORK, and I’ll say it again YOU did the WORK, no matter what PA is. Don’t spend one more moment debating being worthy. You’ve shown determination and spirit in getting this far—and I am amazed at the resourcefulness in promotion found here. So, go kick ass and fugitabout it.