Image by Doug Wheller

I’ve complained once or twice on the internet (yeah, who am I kidding? Multiply by a factor of at least ten here) about self-publishers who claim that they are indie authors, when an indie author used to be someone who published with an independent press and a self-publisher was someone who published with a vanity press.

I was quite pleased to see this article by Henry Mance on the new face of vanity publishing, which he claims has been updated for the digital age. Now that any Tom, Dick or Harry can publish their own eBook, Henry Mance claims that vanity publishing has reemerged in a new form, which sees the big names like Sir John Hegarty, Charles Saatchi and Morrissey (yes, him again) publishing books to stroke their own egos. Henry’s article The Agony of Hegarty on Creativity is in the Financial Times Business Books section, so you may need to sign up for a free account to read it. It’s a stinger of a review though, so definitely worth the investment of the three minutes that it takes.