Talk:List of self-publishing companies

Rationale for page creation

The need for this page was discussed on Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources/Noticeboard and there was support for its creation to inform users. And hopefully, eventually lead to a bot that checks ISBNs that lead to these and flag them. History2007 (talk) 20:23, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Considering self-published sources are allowed, especially for WP:ABOUTSELF, I don't see how a bot will be able to differentiate between a legitimate use and a bad use of a self-published source. That's something that requires human intelligence. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 20:41, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

It would not need to delete it, just flag it once for someone to check. There is a bot that flags disambigs, so it would be like that - leaves a message somewhere - that is all. History2007 (talk) 20:48, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

I suppose a message on the talk page might be OK, but I hope it would keep track of which ones its already flagged, so it's not repeatedly posting messages about the same sources over and over again. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 20:51, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, right. That would be part of the design. I really do not have time to write the bot now, but once the list builds up and as I think about it, I will just do it one day, using code from one of the existing bots. There are several that do similar things. Of course, if I could talk you into writing it, that would even be better.... History2007 (talk) 20:53, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

By the way, I left messages for a few Wikiprojects where these publishers were used (there are plenty) and suggestions from there may help shape the design of the bot, or other strategies for dealing with the use of these types of books. They are used all over the place (from philosophy to chemistry to medicine, etc.) and something needs to be done. History2007 (talk) 21:50, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

What is the inclusion criteria?

Should we make it a requirement that all items be notable? Items that aren't notable can go to Wikipedia:List of self-publishing companies. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 22:40, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, probably so. History2007 (talk) 22:58, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

And how about a category called Self-publishing companies? History2007 (talk) 23:02, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, a category called Self-publishing companies sounds like a good idea. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 23:05, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Ok. I have to do other things for a little while, but please build that if you feel like it. Thanks. History2007 (talk) 23:12, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

I don't do anything with categories. I'll leave that to you. :) A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 23:20, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Created, feel free to populate. --RL0919 (talk) 23:30, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for trimming this list, that was my main concern, we don't want it used for promotional purposes. And thanks for the category! Dougweller (talk) 12:55, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

I realised we didn't have a category for authors, so I've created Category:Self-published authors. Dougweller (talk) 13:32, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Good idea. But if an author is self-published at times, and not others, then what happens? And Stephen Wolfram made a big mistake (professional semi-suicide) by doing that with A New Kind of Science, so he would be an interesting case in that category. History2007 (talk) 13:36, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

They are still self-published authors, even if some of their stuff isn't self-published. Dougweller (talk) 13:54, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

I guess that is probably the case. The point is that usually self-published authors are those who can not get published by major/respectable publishers because the low quality of their work, and I thought Wolfram's case was funny because the man is near-genius and yet self-published not because he could not get published but because he thought no one else was smart enough to review his work. But that is another story. History2007 (talk) 17:03, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Other lists of self-publishing companies

Resolved

 – All companies listed on these 3 articles have now been added to one or both of our lists of self-publishing companies

• List of Self Publishing Companies
• Choosing the best self publishing company for YOUR book
• 2009 Directory of Self-Publishing Companies

We should try to work these into the article and WP:List of self-publishing companies if they're notable. Otherwise, just WP:List of self-publishing companies. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 23:03, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Long list of self-publishing companies

I took the liberty of going through the three lists above, combining them into one single list, eliminating duplicates and sorting them alphabetically. Let's go through this list and:

• Strike through companies already listed at WP:List of self-publishing companies.
• Add unlisted companies to List of self-publishing companies and/or WP:List of self-publishing companies depending on whether or not the company is notable. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 02:21, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Long list of self-publishing companies

48Hour Books Aachanon Arbor Books AuthorHouse Aventine Press BookMasters; Inc BookMobile BookPros BookSurge Booklocker Bookstand Publishing CreateSpace Destiny 11 Dog Ear Publishing E-Booktime Economical Self Publishing Fidlar Doubleday First Choice Books Foremost Press Goose River Press Infinity Innovo Publishing InstantPublisher.com iUniverse JADA Press Laredo Publishing Llumina Press Lulu Mill City Press Morris Publishing Network Printers Omega Publications Outskirts Press PageFree Publishing Pleasant Word Professional Press Publish America Red Lead Press RoseDog Publishing Self Publishing Spire Publishing Springboard Content & Publishing LLC Tate Publishing Trafford Publishing Tri-State Litho U Build A Book Victory Graphics and Media Virtual Bookworm Wheatmark Book Publishers Whitehall Printing WingSpan Press Word Association Publishers WordPro Wordclay Xlibris Xulon

OK, I cross-referenced the above list with List of self-publishing companies and WP:List of self-publishing companies. Anything that was in these list articles was struck thru. Anything remaining needs to be added to List of self-publishing companies and/or WP:List of self-publishing companies. I'm going to bed for the night. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 03:11, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

I think those would make a pretty nice addition. Thanks. History2007 (talk) 11:31, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, feel free to help out. :) A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 13:01, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Actually my friend I think this project is rapidly outpacing the few of us here and we may need more general help in promoting it, so:

• People know it exists and hence avoid these publishers
• Look for the uses of these sources in the thousands of (or even more?) articles in which they are used, and somehow remedy the situation

I will type a few more messages in a few places to seek help. History2007 (talk) 13:12, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

OK, I'm done for today. If anyone was holding off because you didn't want an edit conflict with me, you can go ahead. Out of 56 companies on the list, 25 have been added to one of the lists. Almost half way done. :) A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 22:47, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

OK, all companies listed in the above three articles are accounted for in one or both of these lists. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 01:04, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Cashflow?

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how Cashflow is a self-publishing company. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 11:47, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

That fellow seems to publish elsewhere so Cashflow Technologies probably does not fit here. I also saw it on the other list and probably needs to be removed from both. History2007 (talk) 15:22, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

evidence

I was asked to check the list, and I will. It is really necessary to have good evidence, and. like other lists of things which may be thought to be derogatory, the key evidence should be linked here, not just on the individual article page. I'll get to it, but over the next week or so. DGG ( talk ) 01:35, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, your help will be appreciated. In cases such as Vantage Press there are clear NY Times links that establish that. Other cases do need to be checked. History2007 (talk) 02:11, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Category confusion

There seems to be some confusion in categories - not all of these are self-publishing companies. Lightning Source is a print on demand company for publishers, not authors, basically a printer/e-book producer. Print on demand in itself is a respectable publication method, though self-publishers often use it. BiblioBazaar publishes reprints, and BooksLLC republishes free material; I don't see that either is also a self-publisher. I'm also a bit bothered that the list includes decent companies, dubious companies and scams all together, though I see that's addressed in the rationale. I haven't looked at the long list. Cataobh (talk) 00:27, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, the two lists do need clean up and similar issues may be present in WP:List of self-publishing companies, and need to be addressed. This has been a recent list and does need to be further checked. And the on demand point is valid. As a start, I suggest we separate those into another list, if notable. Could you please make a sublist here of the problems you see. So should we have three classes/categories:

• Self-pblishers (who help authors)
• Reprint publishers who print out of date texts, etc.
• On demand printers who serve the publishers (not applicable here)

Other classes? Thanks. History2007 (talk) 08:03, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Just because something is self-published doesn't necessarily mean that it's not any good. I happen to know someone who has a self-published book which is now taught at the university level. Being self-published just means we need to be careful when citing these sources. Lightning Source is listed by PBS as 5 Great Services for Self-Publishing Your Book. However, maybe we should remove BiblioBazaar and Books LLC? Thoughts? A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 19:26, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

I fully agree with your statement in the edit summary that "Just because something is self-published doesn't necessarily mean that it's not any good." and on the other page I mentioned A New Kind of Science as a key modern example: the respected publishers would have lined up to publish it, but as is, it is self-published because he thought he was too good for them. But the issue of on demand services and ancient texts is a different issue probably.

I am not even sure there are clear borders now between some of these Print on demand entities. From that page:

Print-on-demand services that offer printing and distributing services to publishing companies (instead of directly to self-publishing authors) are also growing in popularity within the industry. The leading print-on-demand service providers for publishing companies are Lightning Source, a division of Ingram Content Group, a leading U.S. book wholesaler, and more recently BookSurge (now Createspace.com), an Amazon.com company.

Now if you look at Outskirts Press and PediaPress as well, I am not sure how to categorize all of these. History2007 (talk) 20:33, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

A New Kind of Science (of which I hadn't previously heard) is (I read) written by Wolfram and published by Wolfram. Although I can make various guesses, I don't know for sure what "published by Wolfram" means. I'm pretty sure, though, that it's different in some significant ways from publication by, say, Xulon or Blurb. I think that Xulon, Dubsar, and many more correspond fairly well to what have been called "vanity presses" (within which article there is a short, partially sourced list).

Certainly much of publishing these days doesn't accord with the impression you might get from the recent chapters of a not-so-very-new history of an established publisher (e.g. John Murray). Perhaps I'm less ignorant of photobooks than I am of other areas of books, and so: Blurb will (I think) "publish" (print-on-demand) anything that you ask them to (excepting porn, libel, etc); I'd expect the worst, but the best is highly praised indeed. Sokyu-sha is a respected publisher and will only publish what it thinks is good; but the photographer has to pay for the privilege. Indeed, only a small percentage of a bookstore's photobooks of newish content didn't require payment by the photographer. Publication by Sokyu-sha wouldn't normally be called self-publishing, a term that can and is used to cover a lot of books by people who get articles here: Araki's first book, Takanashi's first book, most of Hornstra's books, etc etc -- should each of these photographers appear in this list? By most understandings of "self" and "publisher"; they've been self-publishers. -- Hoary (talk) 07:51, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

The issue of photography books is interesting, in that they obviously do not have a serious issue with respect to factual errors, or scholarly agreement. But that is probably not the focus of this effort, given that we are trying to weed out the claims to scholarship by the authors who get published through Xulon, Authorhouse, etc. I think the aim here is to avoid mixing content from in Authorhouse type items with books by Princeton University Press which go through scholarly review. I mean if someone is still a high school student and somehow finds the money to pay Vantage Press they will publish a book on high energy physics. That is what we are trying to categorize here. History2007 (talk) 08:54, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

That's a worthwhile purpose, but it surprises me. After all, this list is in article space, not in Wikipedia space. (Oh, and while I don't want to run this discussion off the rails, a minor response: Many photobooks come with essays about the photographer, or the photographs, by somebody other than the photographer. If the book were published by Thames & Hudson [at least as that was a decade or more ago] or Aperture, the form of publication wouldn't make it suspect. But these days?) Anyway, although both publisher and photographer usually keep discreetly/embarrassedly quiet about the need for money up front, here is an informative (and appreciative) exception. -- Hoary (talk) 09:14, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Ok, so what we have figured out now is that the world of photo-books is somewhat different. Now, let us see what everyone thinks of the way "self-published" applies in that world. But we do need to make some decision, and it is clear that that decision will not be perfect. But neither is the world we write about. History2007 (talk) 09:21, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Well actually . . . no. I don't claim to be up to date with publishing outside photobooks; but the situation for photobooks would have been almost unimaginable not so many years ago, and I start to wonder whether outwardly conventional publishers of text-only books aren't using the same model. (NB I have no reason to think that they do, merely not much to think that they don't.) -- Hoary (talk) 10:50, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

How about "VDM Publishing"? I'm thinking now not of their scrapings of Wikipedia articles and the like but instead of their republishing of PhD theses. As I understand it, the newly minted PhD gets a polite email from VDM suggesting publication. The PhD is to pay no money. Well, why not? Better an inelegant, overpriced paperback from a dubious-sounding publisher than (the normal fate of dissertations) no book at all. So VDM "publishes" it (dumps the PDF to a printer, on demand). There's a certain appeal to the author's vanity, but nothing worse. A handful of libraries are led to buy copies of books, asked for by friends of the authors, people who don't know what "VDM" means, etc. ¶ And I don't think that VDM is alone. -- Hoary (talk) 10:50, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

List of self-publishing companies vs. Wikipedia:List of self-publishing companies

This is a duplicate discussion. Let's try to keep everything in one spot. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:List_of_self-publishing_companies#List_of_self-publishing_companies_vs._Wikipedia:List_of_self-publishing_companies. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 13:50, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
I see the template: Not to be confused with Wikipedia:List of self-publishing companies. on this page. ... but, quite frankly, I am confused, as I am sure many others are too. We have two parallel articles in two parallel name spaces with the identical name, and neither concisely makes clear why the apparent duplication. List of self-publishing companies Wikipedia:List of self-publishing companies I suppose one is supposed to be resources for people wanting to self-publish and the other, maybe is a list of self-publishing channels? Maybe that would explain why some companies are on both lists. In particular, I don't understand why one of these is in the Wikipedia name-space. Also, it is confusing that both pages have the same identical title. Maybe they should be merged? Maybe create a table and check off stats and services that each provide. A sortable merged list would begin to be useful. Enquire (talk) 04:12, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Reminder about inclusion criteria

The inclusion criteria for this "List of" article is that each company be independently notable. If a company doesn't meet WP:N, then it doesn't meet the inclusion criteria. I've cleaned up the article and removed several red-links. BTW, there's an article in Wikipedia space, Wikipedia:List of self-publishing companies which includes companies regardless of whether they meet WP:N. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 13:32, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Inclusion criteria

In my view, this list should not be confined to companies that satisfy WP:N because, in my view, that violates WP:CIRCULAR and WP:OR, because notability appears to be a Wikipedia invention. In my view, the criteria should be WP:V and WP:RS (i.e. at least one independent reliable source that says "X is a self-publishing company"). We could have a subject index of Wikipedia articles on self-publishing companies, but [it would be preferable for] the title of such an index is supposed to begin with the word "index" and include in the word "articles". James500 (talk) 20:21, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

notability is a pretty standard inclusion criteria for lists. also note WP:LSP. IRWolfie- (talk) 20:25, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

It should cease to be. James500 (talk) 20:29, 10 May 2013 (UTC) WP:LSP does not appear to be referenced to independant reliable sources. Accordingly, I perceive a gap that ought to be filled. James500 (talk) 20:33, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

A list can also be a way of dealing with less-than-notable companies, if this is clear in the introduction. The list can be expaanded with available information--and this can beturned into sections, some of which may eventually become articles. See WP:LISTPURP sections 1 and 3, both of which are relevant. And then WP:CSC point 3: "Short, complete lists of every item that is verifiably a member of the group. These should only be created if a complete list is reasonably short (less than 32K) and could be useful (e.g., for navigation) or interesting to readers. The inclusion of items must be supported by reliable sources. " The verifiability requirement is really quite direct: one first checks their own website, and then verifies that they actually have published books. (there are a good number that have never actually published anything)DGG (at NYPL) -- reply here 19:16, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

balance

A list would overbalance the article, and is better kept as a separate list. The current information needs to be combined and located there. There is abundant other material to expand this article.DGG (at NYPL) -- reply here 19:16, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 24 December 2014

30 minutes and no reply on the user talk page ?? heavy working? so again for discussion: senior editors from wikipedia act like dictators, they rule the world. So hopefully you will sleep well with deleting all entries you havn't wrote or edited by yourself. Have fun.

P.S. Maybe you will need some updates like here: just a "citation" >You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to a user name, among other benefits.

>Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable. Work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited, used, and redistributed—by anyone—subject to certain terms and conditions.

Conclusion: "you" are not forced to create an account - just "make your edits". Maybe you (RK) overrule this wikipedia basics with ... So - have fun by further deleting editing on edits in old articles which need revision

84.189.6.116 (talk) 00:58, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

 Declined - Your previous edit attempts appear to be an advertisement for 2seasagency, which violates our policy on WP:SPAM. Your edit semi-protected request specifies no specific text to be added or changed and is therefore invalid. A properly-formed request, if it merely re-instates the spam link to 2seasagency, would likely be rejected per our external links policy so please don't try to add the link or request others to do so again. K7L (talk) 15:49, 24 December 2014 (UTC)