Writer Beware Blogs!: Archway Publishing: Simon & Schuster Adds a Self-Publishing Division

Writer Beware blog writes:

"Yesterday, venerable trade publisher (and one of the Big 5) Simon & Schuster announced the launch of Archway Publishing, a self-publishing services provider." Read more at: Writer Beware Blogs!: Archway Publishing: Simon & Schuster Adds a Self-Publishing Division

OK, writers, to get published you don't have to pay one thin dime. The publisher pays you.

If you've submitted to all the royalty-paying publishers and been turned down for that particular book, and you'd like to see it in print, you still don't have to pay. Go to Lulu.com for print books or Smashwords for e-books, and you can share your work among friends and to your mother for free.

Publishing for a vanity press or subsidy press is NOT 'the way all the real pros got started'. It isn't 'the way you have to go to get started these days'. If you mention your vanity press novel as a writing credit, you show yourself as a clueless amateur.

Plus, vanity/subsidy press books don't sell. When was the last time you bought a self-published book that wasn't written by your cousin or someone in your writers group?

The article above mentions that there is a current trend for respectable publishing houses to create these 'self-publishing' divisions, names some names of these vanity press divisions (including a Christian publisher), and gives more info.

I wonder how that will work out in the real world of writing. For the publishers that still accept some unsolicited manuscripts, will they be sending the rejected writers a flyer about their vanity press division. Worse, will they tell the clueless writer that their novel, while rejected by the publisher, has been 'accepted' by the vanity press? And the hapless would-be author is suckered in to paying the bill because Simon & Schuster told them to.