vanity press

plural vanity presses

1. derogatoryA book publisher that lets the author pay the expenses of publishing up front, leaving the risk of financial failure with the author.

   In 1956, having had her book turned down by commercial presses who were unwilling to publish a work on lesbian literature, Foster spent $2000, her year's salary, to print the book through a vanity press, Vantage.

   1981 August 22, Maida Tilchen, “Jeannette Howard Foster Dies”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 6, page 3

   1 more example

   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.

   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, →OCLC, page 88, column 1

   Synonyms: subsidy publisher, vanity publisher