vanity press

English

WOTD – 11 August 2022

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

vanity press (plural vanity presses)

(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
- 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 0199-6649, OCLC 818915902, 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.

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)