New Book Exposes Inept and Dishonest Vanity Publisher Outskirts Press

March 28, 2010 - PRLog -- Outskirts Press calls itself "the fastest-growing full-service publishing provider." It published seven books in 2002, its first year, and over 5,000 books in 2009. According to author Michael N. Marcus, "Some of those books, and the press releases and web pages that promote them, are filled with stupid and silly errors. When authors are disappointed and enraged, service reps evade responsibility, citing loopholes in the publishing contract."

Marcus says that Outskirts is also inept and dishonest when it promotes itself. Its website, emails, press releases, blogs and promotional literature have factual errors, mistakes in grammar, spelling and arithmetic — and deliberate distortion.

Marcus's humorous and informative new book, "Stupid, Sloppy, Sleazy: The Strange Story of Vanity Publisher Outskirts Press. How do they stay in business?" details the company's foibles, falsehoods and failures.

Outskirts uses such grandiose phrases as "a veritable army of publishing professionals" to attract customers — but those professionals tell lies to make independent self-publishing seem much harder than it really is, and to make competitors seem worse than they are.

Although Outskirts uses such buzzwords as "self-publishing" and "print-on-demand," it's really a vanity publisher. Vanity publishers make most of their money by selling services and overpriced promotional trinkets to naïve, starry-eyed authors — not by selling books to readers. The books are often ugly, unedited and overpriced. They sell poorly, and are seldom reviewed.

This book was written to make potential customers of Outskirts Press and other vanity publishers aware of the trouble that likely awaits them, and to let vanity publishers know that their incompetence and dishonesty will be noticed and publicized.

It's also a very funny book.

"Stupid, Sloppy, Sleazy" is being published both as a $10.95, 138-page paperback (initially available from CreateSpace and coming soon to Amazon.com and other booksellers), and as a $5 downloadable eBook from Lulu.com. The ISBN is 978-0-9816617-2-8.

About the Author: Michael N. Marcus is a journalist, author, publisher and blogger. This is his tenth book, and his third book about publishing. He frequently criticizes inept publishers and writers at BookMakingBlog.blogspot.com, and advises self-publishing authors as the president of the Independent Self-Publishers Alliance.

NOTE TO JOURNALISTS, REVIEWERS & BLOGGERS: review copies are available from the publisher, Silver Sands Books. Please email requests to books (at) ablecomm.com.

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About Silver Sands Books: Silver Sands Books is a small "indie publisher," specializing in helpful books which make technical subjects easy to understand. Two of our speciality areas are publishing and telecommunications.

We also have non-technical books, plus blogs and websites.

Although we use offset printing for some books, we are a GREEN PUBLISHER, using "print on demand" (POD) production for our technical books to insure that our readers can get up-to-date books at the lowest possible cost.