This week’s post is brought to you with a large side order of snot and a cough so hacking that it would put Pier’s Morgan’s mobile phone to shame. I’m still alive (just) and recovering from my first bout of Freelancer’s Flu of the year.

As writers, we all crave an acknowledgement that our work is good. We want it to be funny/incisive/clever/heartwrenching/used to mop up your spilled coffee, and we need to be given regular assurances. It doesn’t matter whether that piece of work was a 500 word blog post on the merits of taking a motorbike trip round Vietnam, or a deeply thought out bestselling novel on the time you were shortchanged in B&M bargains and sought revenge on the cashier, ‘with hilarious consequences’. WE NEED TO BE TOLD WE’RE GOOD, DAGNABBIT.

This brings me on to the thorny issue of trying to get something published. We live in strange times. Twenty or thirty years ago, to get a book publised you had to stand out from the crowd, be lucky enough to attract one of the big names, get a book deal and go forth. It really was that sim…no…it really wasn’t. It was hard work. It STILL is. Unless of course you were Barbara Cartland and could just simply fart out a novel covered in pink feathers and black eyeliner before breakfast without even thinking about it.

These days there are so many options for publishing that industry bods are decrying the fact that the market is now being saturated with low quality, badly edited fiction and non-fiction that simply languishes in the online equivalent of bargain bins.

There are many writers out there (and I count myself as one of them) that have a dream to write brilliant novels that everyone will love, that will be bought in their millions and mean that the day job can be ditched, so that they can stare wistfully out of the window and talk endlessly about ‘the creative process’ to anyone that will listen. I’ll be honest, I think the pigeon in our back garden is getting a bit fed up with me now…

One seemingly very easily achieveable way of doing this is to self-publish your work, or use what is commonly known as vanity publishing to do it.

Now then. Here is where the confusion begins. Most vanity publishers are completely upfront about it (think about sites like Lulu.com) and Amazon Kindle Direct (who allow authors to upload their work to their ebook service for free and claim a fairly decent chunk of their royalties) they’ll allow writers who have had no success elsewhere get their work out there, and are seemingly honest.

There are some, I have uncovered whilst hawking my own tatty wares around, who appear on the surface to offer a genuine hope of publishing, who get back to you quickly when you submit a manuscript, to dangle the carrot of a deal in front of you, then tell you that in order to use their high quality service, you need to pay them quite a few thousand pounds.

No real publisher, no decent publisher would ever do that, and there are numerous reviews of such companies on Google that have caught other writers out as well. A real publisher will offer a contract, and then work with you to edit, polish and market a book – with them taking a cut of the royalties. A vanity publisher will ask the writer up front for money. They may do little to no editing on the submitted manuscript, they’ll put some kind of generic cover on the book. They’ll promise to market it for you, but in reality may not. Once they’ve got your money, that’s their part of the deal done. And thusly, so is the writer.

Many people, have, of course, used vanity publishers to sell their work and have justifiably done very well out of it. Many people have not. Over the last few weeks I’ve read stories of people who have lost thousands of pounds in schemes like this. They get their work published, but at a high price and make little to nothing in return.

For some, they’re not that arsed. They had a dream. They could afford to pursue it. Their work is out there. Job done. For others, it can be a confidence shattering experience.

The advice from many sources is, if you want to self publish, do so using a Print on Demand service like Lulu or Amazon and then do the leg work to get your book to sell. It will still cost you some money, but not half as much as employing a.n.other vanity publisher to steal money from you and give you nothing back.

In the meantime, continue to submit to genuine literary agents and REAL publishers who accept unsolicited manuscripts. You’ve nothing to lose. Here endeth this week’s sermon.