IS ARGYLE FOX A VANITY PUBLISHER?

Vanity publishing. The phrase makes you cringe. After all, vanity publishers are the worst of the worst—right?

Because vanity presses have such a bad rep, no reputable publishing company uses the label. In fact, no disreputable company does either. It’s bad for business.

So, what is a vanity press, and is Argyle Fox Publishing one of them?

Defining Vanity Publishing

The basic definition of a vanity press is as follows:

A vanity press is any publishing company that charges authors to publish their books.

Accurate as this may be, advances in self-publishing make this definition a bit outdated.

What’s Wrong with Vanity Publishers?

If that’s all a vanity publisher is, what’s the problem? That’s basically what self-published authors do when they hire people to edit and design their books. And again, thanks to technological advances, the quality of self-published books often matches the major publishers. 

The problem is that vanity presses are known for publishing anything you throw at them. That’s fine if you’ve written a good book. But what if your book is riddled with errors? Or what if it doesn’t make sense?

With the vanity publishers of old, that shoddy manuscript would make its way to print, warts and all. As long as they got paid, they didn’t care if your book was horrible.

As a result, many who turned to vanity presses paid good money for a basement full of books no one wanted to buy. Because nobody wants a book that reads like a rough draft.

So, Is Argyle Fox Publishing a Vanity Publisher?

In the simplest sense, yes. Argyle Fox Publishing charges to publish your book. So if that’s the only qualification, we fit the bill.

But that’s not the end of the story.

While we are a publishing company, we see ourselves as a publishing partner. We help authors get their book off their computer and onto bookshelves, and the authors have control every step of the way.

We work with authors and do everything they . . .

• don’t know how to do
• don’t want to do
• don’t have time to do

We don’t pay advances, but we also don’t take a penny of your profits. Once you publish, all the profit from every book sale goes straight into your bank account. And we do something vanity publishers don’t normally do. We pull back the curtain and provide complete transparency.

Here at Argyle Fox Publishing, we don’t hide our prices, products, or procedures. We answer every question authors have, even if they decide not to use us.

Founded by author D.K. Brantley, Argyle Fox Publishing exists to help authors share their stories with the world. Whether you call us a vanity publisher or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that we treat our authors like they want to be treated and do our best to make their book better than they ever imagined.

That may sound vain to you, but it sounds like kindness to us.