"Hybrid" Publishers ...are they always a rip-off?

I just ordered a copy of a new book written by an old school friend of mine, via Amazon. It was published by an outfit which I won't name—but it advertises itself as a 'hybrid' publisher.

Okay, the publisher claims to offer 'services' on their website, which I checked. But what my friend sent them was an already-proofread, fully edited copy of a nonfiction book (memoir) that is only 172 pages long, 21.5 cm tall and 14 cm wide. It's printed in Times New Roman ...and the front cover is printed in a bog-standard, sans serif font—the kind you'd set up with a wordprocessor. It contains 11 pages (not sheets, pages) of extremely ropey, dimly visible, family photos, but aside from that, the book is all text. It's readable, but that's all you can say for it ...I'm not talking about the book's contents, which are excellent, but simply the production of the paperback. The cover design is horrendously amateurish—like some clip art thing.

I'm not sure what else this company has agreed to do for her, but they charged her $5000. FIVE GRAND!!!

I initially contacted the company to see if I could buy a copy directly from them and get it shipped to the UK. (My friend lives in the USA.) They quoted me a price (including shipping) of $51 for the book. I declined, and got it from Amazon for £14 and no shipping charges.

I didn't want to create any waves, as the deed has been done. But holy mud. This seems like quite a rip-off for creating a table of contents and setting the book up for printing, and creating a very crappy front cover—which is more or less all they did.

Is this typical of 'hybrid' publishers? Is this just another name for Vanity Press? I'm afraid to enquire more of my friend, because I don't want her to be upset. But $5000 for an already clean and proofread memoir with a few grey and white pictures included in the middle of the book seems ...steep? I don't know if they are helping her with promotion or not ...and if they are, and getting it into brick-and-mortar bookstores, etc, this price might seem more reasonable. But geez....I certainly heard alarm bells. If the production had been to a professional standard, that would be a different story. But this book is NOT well produced at all. It's like something you could run off on a home printer.

 

Not only a vanity press (by any other name) but can't you get a print on demand service just like you can get self-published?

Unless the publisher was able to contribute an awful lot of marketing, just what did they do exactly?

Yep, just checked and besides CreateSpace it looks like there are a number of them now.

 

I was seriously horrified. But she seems happy, so I won't rock the boat. But GEEZ....

 

Holy shit, pardon my french. Nearly 10 grand? !!! She'll be doing very well to make that back in sales. Which means she'll be very lucky to break even.

I know my friend didn't use the hybrid for editing. She told me that she and her sister edited and proofread the book themselves (to a high standard) in order to 'save money.' So the 5 grand she paid did NOT cover editing and proofreading.

I don't know if she paid for a print run, or if this is just print on demand. That would make a difference, I suppose. But does she want to get stuck with a ton of unsold books? At any rate, she wasn't asking for people to buy them off her, so I suspect even a print run didn't happen.

I can understand not wanting to be bothered with formatting and setting the book up for printing and kindle, etc. I can understand being willing to pay for this service—same as you might pay an editor or a proofreader or a cover designer. You could even pay for advice on, or direct help with, pricing, distribution, etc. But the companies that do this kind of work should be calling themselves 'Book Publishing Services' or something of this nature. Not 'Publishers."

These companies will incur no risk if the book fails to sell—unlike the risk an actual Publisher takes. And as you say, these companies get paid by the authors directly, not by book sales.

Folks like my friend can get really taken in by the word "Publishers."

I wish I had known she was doing this before it was too late, so I could have warned her. It's not as if she is rolling in money. She had to use a good chunk of her retirement savings to finance this.

 

This just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it....

 

Here's an example of those kind of operations: https://www.millcitypress.net/

It's like Chinese menu of services, but there's no Column B -- everything comes off Column A, which is the high-priced side of the menu.

Traditional vanity press is (or was) much more open about what they do (did) -- they are printers. Back in the 1980s I produced a book for a friend, whose brother had written a book and then died before it could be published. She (my friend) had a friend who was a literary agent, and he had no luck shopping the book to any traditional publisher so my friend and the brother's widow decided to self-publish it as a memorial to the departed brother/husband.

I didn't charge anything for what I did -- because I had no idea what I was getting into when I started. The only copy of the manuscript was typed on a typewriter, and the illustrations and diagrams were all hand-drawn. Vanity press companies back then were just short-run printers -- they didn't offer a smorgasbord of "services." They wanted camera-ready pages. So I transcribed the manuscript into the computer, did a cursory edit (the late author was a scientist and the book was written almost entirely in the passive voice -- we made a conscious decision NOT to change that, because the sister and widow wanted the book to be Alex's book), ran it through the spell checker, then I used a couple of different graphics programs to reproduce the diagrams. When all that was in place, I used a desktop publishing program called Publish-It! (which functionally was much like Quark Express, minus many of the professional-level fine tuning and color controls) to format it as a book.

My then girlfriend, who was a graphic artist, did the cover. We printed the whole mess out, complete with crop/alignment hash marks on the corners, mailed it to the vanity press company, and they shipped two cases of books to my friend. The minimum run, IIRC, was 500 books, and I think that cost them $3,000 or $3,500.

The point being that ALL the vanity press company did was print and ship the books. That's the difference between traditional vanity press and the so-called "hybrid publishers." It seems to me that the hybrid model gives the authors all the disadvantages of the vanity press model, and very little of the advantages of the traditional press model.

 

Yeah, my friend was perfectly willing to pay, and happy with what she got. She thinks that's what it takes to get published. And she believes she WAS 'published.'

If she had asked me beforehand, I'd have let her know there are other options.

The interesting thing is, her book might well have been a candidate for traditional publishing. It's a memoir, very well-written and remembered, from the viewpoint of a nearly-blind person adjusting to life in a sighted world. Her story begins with her kindergarten days at an ordinary grade/primary school in the 1950s (we were in the same class)—where there were no facilities at all for a partly-sighted person—to her recent life after retirement. There are many traditional publishers who would have been interested in such a non-fiction story, told from such a lively, detailed perspective. The writer has tons of personality and the book is both readable and fascinating.

But instead, a friend 'recommended' this hybrid to her. It was the first company she applied to, and the book got taken on first go (surprise, surprise.) So she also now thinks it's easy to get published! It's just so much work doing all that proofreading....