Small Press is not Vanity Press

I was rather dismayed recently to have one of our authors say to me. “I’ve never worked with the vanity press before.”

None of the imprints I work with are vanity press. In fact, they’re pretty traditional because:

·         We don’t charge authors to be published

·         We don’t publish everything that is sent to us.

·         Everything that is published goes through a rigorous editing process.

Fool proof?

Never.

Proof-reading

That final stage before we upload to the printers is so crucial. We’ve edited three times at least: the structural edit, the line edit and the copy edit. Now we proof read and we do that after the text is camera ready. Some odd mistakes can creep in at the end.

Here are a few examples of what we’ve found recently:

·         Some formatting jumped and some strange line-throws appeared as a document was changed from Word into a PDF. We think that this was because the original document had been written on a Mac and paragraph breaks were forced.

·         A couple of words collided into each other. We had to put the spaces back in. 

·         One story was written as a letter. We used a special font for that. Every other paragraph reverted to our Normal style.