All Is Not Vanity

I am often asked if Memoirs Unlimited offers vanity publishing. My unequivocal answer is, No we do not.

It is true that our clients pay for the writing and publication of their books. We do not pay royalties like so-called trade publishers. But the term vanity publishing definitely does not apply to our clients.

First, vanity publishers claim that they will distribute a client’s book through such channels as Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. So vanity publishers appeal to authors who cannot sell their ideas to mainstream publishers but who want to try anyway.

Our clients have a different motivation: to preserve a story that otherwise would be lost and to tell that story to a select audience. For example, a grandfather entering his 80s may reason that he had better put his story to paper before it is too late—not only to tell his own life’s tale but also and often especially to pass on the stories of his parents and grandparents.

His audience, meanwhile, and his ambitions are far more limited. Some of our clients have printed as few as 50 or 100 books, distributing them to close family and friends. When considering a print run for a personal memoir, I often ask the client how big their Christmas card list is.

Second, and this surprises many people, I find that my clients are not motivated by vanity! Whether they are successful businesspeople with a good story worth telling—or a large organization like Massachusetts General Hospital, for which I just completed a bicentennial history—they are motivated by the practical need to gather, preserve, and pass on a personal, family, or organizational history, just because that’s what human beings do. Vanity has nothing to do with it.