Those crazy Frenchmen (and women)

I wish I could take credit for finding this story--but I cannot. The incredible, prolific folks at Publisher's Lunch found a great article that will be of (humorous) interest to the folks with one foot in the POD world.

Here is the entry from PL:

French Vanity: In the US, people try to embarrass self-publishers by submitting garbage manuscripts. In France, newspaper Le Figaro did the opposite, submitting MADAME BOVARY to five vanity publishers. Many companies judged it good enough to be worth taking $3,000 to 5,000 from the "author" to print up some copies.

Read the article and laugh.

Apparently taking advantage of authors is pandemic.
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And here's another little tasty treat, this time regarding why you can't get a book deal. Why is this worth reading? Because it's funny and accurate--but most of all because the author of this blog is a marketing professional for Vintage (which, for those of you who are not plugged in to the publishing scene, is an imprint of the Knopf Publishing Group, which is a division of Random House, which is a company within Bertelsmann, which owns 3/4 of the free world.)