I’m back at my desk for 2025 and I’m looking for vainglorious manuscripts across all genres. The writing style must be very, very vain to catch my attention.

Just kidding.

‘Vanity publisher’ is an old-fashioned term that gets thrown around whenever hybrid publishing or self-publishing is discussed. It’s a term that needs to be abandoned as a relic of the past.

It is not vain to want your book to exist in the world. It is not vain to take matters into your own hands and make it happen.

It is not vain to want to avoid the tortuous process of waiting weeks, months or even years (or never) to be told by a traditional publisher that your manuscript has been rejected.

This happened to me, and it was very painful.

In 2025, publishing a book is a business decision. It’s also a deeply creative endeavour, which is why retaining creative control is important. You get that with self-publishing.

Thanks to new technologies such as print on demand services and Shopify, there are multiple pathways to becoming a successful author. The stigma around self-publishing makes no sense. Why wouldn’t you want to retain all your royalties? If anything, I see a degree of vanity among those who only want their book to be published if it was ‘chosen’ by a publisher who rejects thousands of others.

I say: let readers decide whether your book is amazing.

I recently watched a webinar on hybrid publishing and self-publishing that was hosted by one of the world’s most respected voices in publishing, Jane Friedman. She stopped early on to address a question from a participant about how to spot a ‘vanity publisher.’

“I find that ‘vanity publisher’ is more of an old school term,” she said. “I think it’s maybe unnecessarily pejorative. It’s really just about that you are paying a company to help be published. I know that the term is not as relevant today as it might have been, say, 20 years ago. I don’t want to put any value judgment here between paid publishing services and hybrid. It just depends on your needs.”

With that rant over, I will soon have an exciting announcement about a new opportunity for Hembury Books authors to get their books into the hands of American audiences.