Bonus Essay: Here Be Dragons – Vanity presses, scams, and publishing in the digital era
Welcome to GenrePunk Ninja supplemental, where I occasionally post foundational essays written before I launched the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter, especially if they’re timely to other conversations occurring online. This essay originally appeared in Eclectic Projects issue 2 in 2023. Estimated Reading Time: 30 Minutes | Don’t like reading online? Get an ebook copy here. Here Be Dragons: Vanity presses, scams, and publishing in the digital era THE WORST JOB Back in the early 2000s, when I was fresh out of an arts degree and struggling to pay rent, I scored a job with a newly launched small press who believed eBooks were the next big thing. This sounds commonplace herein 2023, but I’m older than dirt and we’re talking about an era when smartphones didn’t exist. The owners had stumbled onto this belief years before Amazon launched the Kindle and we all carried high powered mini computers in our pockets. In those heady days, eBooks were consumed on dedicated, high-end