Vanity Press
A writer thinks a publishing company wants to publish their book, but it turns out to be a shady self-publishing company that charges money upfront and does a shoddy job printing the book.
Peep Show
Appearances
- The Patty Duke Show: Season 1, episode 19, "Author! Author!" (1964). Patty thinks a publisher accepted her book and is going to pay her an advance, but she has actually signed with a vanity press that expects her to pay $1,500.
- The Addams Family: Season 2, episode 8, "Morticia, the Writer" (1965). Gomez sends Morticia's writing to a publisher, who shows up at their house and says he wants to publish it immediately, but first he wants them to pay him $5,000.
- Newhart: Season 4, episode 20, "Dwight Schmidlapp is Not a Quitter" (1986). Dick is offended when his publisher rejects one of his books because he put his old pen name on it, so he sends the book out to several other publishers, and one of them responds asking him for $2,000 so that he can be the first one in his neighborhood to have his name on a published book.
- Night Court: Season 8, episode 12, "It's Just a Joke" (1990). Bull wrote his autobiography, but no publisher would take it except "Random Author," a vanity publishing company that charged him for enough copies "to make the best seller list."
- Peep Show: Season 8, episode 2, "Business Secrets of the Pharaohs" (2012). Mark has finally gotten around to written some of his book, "Business Secrets of the Pharaohs," and he's even found a publisher—or so he thinks. The publisher, BL Books (the BL stands for "British London"), turns out to be a vanity press that charges Mark $2,000 and delivers piss poor printouts with no editing, missing chapters, part of the text disappearing into the spine, and his name misspelled on the cover.