Vanity press no longer seems vain

Once upon a time, they were called the “vanity press.”

That was the label applied to book publishing houses that would — for a price — publish any book, whether it was commercially or editorially attractive or not.

Writers who had labored over a manuscript only to have it dumped in the slush pile at the big name book publishing companies in New York were the target market. After all, when you’ve put your heart and soul into something only to have it rejected — perhaps numerous times by numerous editors — you’re receptive to anything that will get a book in print.

Even if it means tapping your own savings account to get a couple thousand copies delivered to your front porch so that you can distribute them yourself.

Some would be given to family and friends. Some would be sent to newspapers and periodicals that published book reviews. A few might be sold. But, in the end, many might just end up still in the box they arrived in, tucked away in a basement or an attic or a garage.

So “vanity press” was a pejorative, kind of a veiled insult. To be “self-published” was a nicer term, but it still meant that the author’s ego had taken control of the bank account.

To a far lesser extent, that may still be true today.

But technology and the internet — no surprise there — have changed the game entirely.

Sure, there are still aspiring unpublished authors who put down cash to get their work published as a print-on-demand book available on Amazon or via some other website.

That’s not much different from the old model, though print-on-demand means fewer unread books going to the landfill.

But for every writer or would-be writer who goes that route, there are probably hundreds more who have no dream of publishing a best-seller. They just want to see their work in print so they can hold it in their hands or give it as Christmas gifts.

A confession: I am one of those folks.

The other day I started counting. Turns out, I’ve “published” about 20 different books in the past 15 or so years. Many of them have been “published” in an edition of one.

For me, it started soon after our daughter Emily’s wedding. Her husband, Mike Veloso, had put together a small edition, self-published photo book of their wedding pictures and gave it to us as a Christmas present.

I still remember looking at the book for the first time and thinking, “Those crazy kids! This is a ridiculous extravagance! This must have cost a fortune!”

Twenty minutes later, I was enlightened.

Using a website called Blurb, Mike had put the photo book together in his leisure time, publishing just three copies: One for us, one for Mike’s parents and one for Mike and Emily.

And while the photo books didn’t qualify as cheap, they also didn’t qualify as exorbitantly expensive. They cost about what a nice Christmas present would cost.

After I found that out, I was intrigued, which may be a nicer way of saying that I was hooked.

So when we made a trek to South Africa in 2008 to celebrate my 60th birthday with my Portland High School classmate Gyles Webb and his wife Barbara and came home with dozens of digital images on my camera, a book was the logical solution.

It was an edition of two, one for us to treasure and the other a thank-you gift for Gyles and Barbara. Others followed.

When our first grandchild marked his first birthday, it was time for Grandpa to write and illustrate a little book. Edition size: Three. One for his parents, one for us and one for the other grandparents.

More kid-related books were inevitable as more grandchildren arrived.

And when a group of Ball State grad students scanned something like 400 black and white snapshots from my great-uncle Calvin Haynes’s trip around the world in 1921, I put together the best of them in “Uncle Cal’s Asia.” Again, the press run was tiny. Mostly just for family, though the Jay County Historical Society has a copy.

More recently, I’ve turned to Shutterfly, another web-based small-run publisher. And I’m sure there are other companies out there. Some of the software is friendly; some of it is a pain. And prices vary significantly.

But a nicely-bound, full color book of photos from a vacation or a cruise is the 21st century replacement for those old photo albums of our grandparents’ era.

And there’s really no vanity involved in saving them for posterity.

OK, maybe a little bit. But not too much.