With the commercial self-publishing model there is a desire and also even an expectation that the book will sell, at least in enough quantity to recoup the costs of publishing and hopefully more than that - to actually make a profit. With vanity publishing this is usually not the case; the author simply wants a limited number of nice-looking books with the author's name on to show to friends and family and be able to say - "Look, I've written a book!" It's usually that simple.

​

Our Vanity Publishing submission process is exactly the same as that for our Self-Publishing Deal as the two are in most cases essentially the same, except that with Vanity Publishing there is really no expectation of making any money out of it - you are publishing just for the sake of publishing. You may still want to make use of our "Candlelight Press" imprint so that it might appear to your readers (usually friends and family) that your book has a publisher, but the use of our imprint is only available if your MS does not contain errors, as explained below.

​

1. You will need to send us by email:

​

• A covering letter setting out your initial thoughts on your publishing requirements (e.g. proofreading or not, if you want a cover designing or if you have your own, et cetera). Don't worry too much about the contents of this, as we will arrange a video meeting with you once we've looked at your MS. Please also say what books, if any, you've had published before. If you are a new author and the MS you are sending is your first, please say so.

​

• ​Your complete Manuscript ("MS") in Word format (.docx).

​

2. We will run a software-based spelling/grammar check on your MS and see what issues, if any, come to light.

​

3. We will arrange a video meeting with you to talk about the results of point 2 and we'll discuss whether you want to pay for editing, proofreading et cetera in view of what state your MS is in. This is entirely up to you, BUT we will not publish your book with our imprint if it has errors in the MS as this would damage our reputation and would be unfair to our other authors who rely on an imprint for credibility purposes when getting reviews and selling their books. If you want to carry on and publish your book with errors, we will do so on your instruction (as Vanity Publishing is simply a service we are offering as a contactor) but it will be printed as a Self-Published book without any of our details in it. It will still be diligently typeset, formatted et cetera, but will obviously still contain any spelling/typographical/grammar errors.

 

4. Once we have had the discussion as per point 3, we will give you a price for what you want us to do and if you agree, we will produce your book according to your instructions (this might include setting it up for sale on Amazon, making a Kindle version, et cetera - whatever you tell us that you want basically).

​

5. We will either, at your choice: (1) create new accounts (e.g. on Amazon) or (2) use our existing master accounts to publish and sell your book. If you opt for option 1, we will: set up your Amazon (or other) publishing account and publish your book, including keywords, and then simply hand over the login details and password to you so that you can enter your own bank details and receive your royalties (under this option you will then be responsible yourself for any further changes and maintaining the account, filling in your Tax forms et cetera); or, if you choose option 2, we will collect the book sale royalties on your behalf and remit them to you quarterly (under this option you won't need to worry about maintaining the account, filling in tax forms et cetera; please note we cannot offer this service to US nationals because of IRS rules), we currently charge £20 per remittance for this.

​

Our turnaround times will vary according to how busy we are in terms of submissions, but we will try to reply to you within 2 weeks if we can.

​