It was an interesting RWA meeting last night. We had a man from a vanity press called KiwEpublishing come talk to us, only of course he didn’t call it a vanity press. Print on demand publisher: all this can be yours for only $1295. Two of us, Jackie Ivie and I, had copies of our books with us, and the guy assumed they were POD, which…
…which, actually, you wouldn’t believe how many people assume. “Is it coming out from a major publisher?” is the nicest way that I’ve been asked, and the most frequent way is, “Will we be able to get it in the bookstore?” which just seems like a *very strange* question to me. I’m not exactly sure the “Will we be able to get it in the bookstore” people think it’s POD/vanity or if they just don’t know much about publishing and it’s a genuine question. Mostly I’m inclined to offer them the benefit of the doubt, but the whole thing makes me blink in surprise, bristle with offense, and sort of laugh all at once.
Anyway, we both said, “Er, no,” and he did his thing without ever mentioning that you pay him to print your book until someone asked directly.
I thought we were all very polite, really. None of us snorted out loud (although when he turned on his powerpoint presentation, one of my fellow RWA members who was sitting right next to me muttered, “Oh my *God*,” and when I looked up to see it was a POD presentation I went, “Oh my god,” too. :)) and none of us tried bringing him to the mat over the scam he was running. Mostly it didn’t seem worth it to me at the time, but after he left I was glad to hear that people didn’t seem to be real taken in by him.
They bought me flowers for my first book coming out! *beam* Wasn’t that nice? I’ll take a picture, ’cause they’re very pretty flares!
Ok, apparently that’s as much coherent thought as I can put together for the moment, because this entry’s been sitting here for twenty minutes. So off I go to shower, eat and work. *zoom*