Interesting book 'Ekco Sounds'

[Yorkie]

...By the way, I don't consider my books as 'vanity publications' because they were written to fill a gap in the market, albeit a small one...
Tony

Vanity Publishing' is a bit of an unfortunate term and widely misunderstood.

A vanity press or vanity publisher is a term describing a publishing house in which authors pay to have their books published, rather than a publisher paying the author. It has nothing to do with the normal meaning we attribute to the term ‘vanity’ though it's often considered a pejorative term, implying that an author is only publishing out of vanity and that his or her work could not be commercially successful. In other words, a work published by a vanity press is typically assumed to be un-publishable elsewhere.

Not so.

With vanity publishing, authors pay to have their books published. Because the author is paying to have the book published, the book doesn't go through an approval or editorial process as it would in a traditional setting where the publisher takes a financial risk on the author's ability to write successfully. While a commercial publisher's intended market is the wider general public, a ‘vanity publisher's’ intended market is the author and a very small number of interested members of the general public, often catering for special interest groups. In some cases, authors of a book that is vanity published will buy a substantial number of copies of their book, so that they can give it away as a promotional tool.

Incidentally, as an author/pulisher Tony will know better than me, but I seem to think that if a book is given an ISBN number, a certain quantity have to be given free for libraries.

I'm not sure about that, or how many, but it could be a heavy cost burden for a 'vanity publisher' to stand.