Independent vs. Traditional Publishing

Vantage is your premium choice in publishing. Our full-service approach, backed by over sixty years of experience, entails higher costs and holds us to higher standards of performance. To put this in context, let’s look first at how publishers are classified.

While a number of terms are bandied about – self-publishing, subsidy publishing, vanity publishing – there is a single bright line that discriminates between the two basic groups of publishers. This line is whether you, the author, pay to have your work published, or whether a publisher pays you. The commercial houses – the big six are Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Penguin – typically pay authors an advance against royalties to be generated from book sales.

Advances from commercial publishers range from a hundred dollars to a million dollars and beyond. Royalty publishers are notoriously selective, but if you can convince a royalty house to publish your book – and if you don’t mind ceding your rights to them indefinitely – you have found the most traditional path to publication.

For most writers, for one reason or another, it is simply impossible to interest a commercial house in publishing a book. Despite this, the desire to see one’s hard work and inspiration come to fruition in book form is primal. And it is to satisfy this irrepressible urge that authors have been paying to publish their work since Milton’s time.

Commercial publishers do distinguish themselves in their clout with booksellers. Every bookseller must stock titles from the Big Six, and they and other commercial publishers have developed extensive marketing and sales operations to supply the market and to garner shelf space. Smaller publishers often rely on independent distributors to scale this function. This is the approach Vantage Press has taken.

We are confident when you carefully choose where to publish your book you will choose Vantage for its complete range of incomparable services and its ability to distribute your book to the same market as traditional publishers. Vantage Press books are distributed to retailers by Ingram Publisher Services alongside a variety of commercial publishers that are IPS clients. Our relationship with Ingram ensures that your book will be available to every bookseller in the U.S. and Canada.