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A vanity press is a printer who acts like a publisher that charges writers a fee in return for publishing their books. They are so called because the customer can then tell others they have published a book. These companies often call themselves subsidy publishers.

A publisher owns the right to use a particular ISBN (international standard book number). A self-publisher is an individual author who publishes his or her own writing, taking the steps necessary to be legally recognized as a publisher, such as getting an ISBN and becoming part of a national legal deposit scheme, in addition to assuming marketing and distributing operations. If the author pays someone else to use their ISBN and print a certain number of copies of their book, instead of getting their own ISBN (as a self-publisher) they are being vanity published.

Vanity publishers typically have one sided contracts, charge high fees, provide low quality, sell worthless add-on services related to editing and marketing, and frequently scam the author.

Many PODs (print on demand companies) using modern digital copy machines are the most recent incarnations of vanity presses. They have turned to scamming authors in order to keep their machines busy and to help pay for them. During the first years of the 21st century the printing business went into a slump and the gross oversupply of digital printing machines (like big Xerography machines with add-on units to bind books) forced the traditional printers as well as the new print on demand companies to seek new sources of revenue.

Unlike conventional publishers, vanity presses usually pay no royalties and have no distribution apparatus. Actually many claim to pay, and for the author who actually sells some books some may pay a few insignificant royalties - after deducting all of their expenses. Many claim to have distribution but most stores will not stock vanity titles and the major wholesalers and distributors will not touch most vanity books.

Vanity presses earn their money, not from sales of books to readers like other publishers, but from sales of books to the authors. The author receives the shipment of books and may attempt to resell them through whatever channels are available. In many cases, the copies are not even bound

Another big revenue source, often exceeding the printing costs (especially for print on demand companies), is to sell worthless services for editing, marketing and other related areas. Since the new print on demand technologies make small print runs feasible authors only get a handful of books at best unless they buy more at a small discount from the list price.

Writers considering self-publishing often also consider directly hiring a printer. According to self-publisher and poet Peter Finch, vanity presses charge higher premiums and create a risk that an author who has published with a vanity press will have more difficulty working with a respectable publisher in the future.

The typical library does not consider the product of a vanity press to be a quality book, since most vanity publications have not gone through selection, revision, copyedit and other critical steps which are the norm for a book produced by a traditional for-profit publisher. Most libraries will not accept such vanity publications, even when they are offered free of charge.

All library books have to be described in the catalogue and given classification stickers and other elements. The total cost of cataloguing and general processing in 2002 was about $50 per book in the United States regardless of the size or original cost of the book. Then, the cost of keeping the book on the shelves has to be added, each year. Finally, it is usual for books to be chosen for a library by the application of a collection development policy designed to meet the needs of a particular user community, and vanity publications only rarely meet those needs.

On the rare occasions when libraries accept the product of a vanity press, they will have the donator sign a release form giving to the library the right to do what it pleases with the item. More likely than not the item will then be disposed of in a yearly book sale or by some other process for the distribution of unwanted items. In some cases librarians will reluctantly accept a vanity publication coming from somebody with the political power to close down the library or from somebody who makes regular contributions of extremely large amounts of money to the library budget. Other librarians will choose to resign rather than accept such publications.