vanity press

English

WOTD – 11 August 2022

Etymology

From vanity +‎ press, so called because such a press may be used by otherwise unpublishable authors who want to see their work in print.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˌvænɪti ˈpɹɛs/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˌvænəti ˈpɹɛs/, [-ɾi-]
• Rhymes: -ɛs
• Hyphenation: van‧i‧ty press

Noun

vanity press (plural vanity presses)

1. (derogatory) A book publisher that lets the author pay the expenses of publishing up front, leaving the risk of financial failure with the author.

   Synonyms: subsidy publisher, vanity publisher

   • 1981 August 22, Maida Tilchen, “Jeannette Howard Foster Dies”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 6, page 3:

     In 1956, having had her book turned down by commercial presses who were unwilling to publish a work on lesbian literature, Foster spent $2000, her year's salary, to print the book through a vanity press, Vantage.

   • 1990 November 12, Jerry Pournelle, “The Vanity Press is Much Harder to Spot on 3½-inch Disks”, in InfoWorld, volume 12, number 46, San Mateo, Calif.: InfoWorld Publishing Group, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 88, column 1:

     The self-published book is the joke of the literary world: whether one goes to a printer and has the books made up with one's own imprint, or goes to an "author-subsidized" publisher known in the trade as a "vanity press," doesn't matter: It's easy to tell a real book from the pretenders. […] It's harder to tell with software. A lot of software is published by small startups. Some of these would certainly qualify as vanity press jobs in the book trade, others wouldn't. But there's a far higher number of successes among small software publishers than there are in the usual vanity press book.

Related terms

• vanity publishing

Translations

book publisher that lets the author pay the expenses of publishing up front, leaving the risk of financial failure with the author

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 自費出版／自费出版 (zìfèichūbǎn)

• Finnish: turhakekustantamo
• French: édition à compte d’auteur f
• Galician: please add this translation if you can
• German: Bezahlverlag m, Selbstkostenverlag m, Selbstzahlerverlag m (Austria, Switzerland)
• Greek: εκδόσεις επί πληρωμή (ekdóseis epí pliromí)
• Hindi: वैनिटी प्रेस (vainiṭī pres)
• Italian: editoria a pagamento f
• Japanese: 自費出版 (じひしゅっぱん, jihishuppan)

See also

• self-publishing

Further reading

• vanity press on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “vanity press, n.” under “vanity, adj.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, June 2022.