[1] The term was coined by Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware, as a parallel formation from diploma mill, an unaccredited college or university that offers degrees without regard to academic achievement, and puppy mill, a breeding operation that produces large numbers of puppies for sale with little regard for breed purity, puppy placement, health, or socialization.
Since academic evaluation is largely based on publication count or other bibliometrics, even well-meaning authors may be willing to pay to bolster their career prospects.
Also, author mills tend to share a business model with vanity publishers: no editorial screening of submissions, no meaningful pre-publication editing, no meaningful post-publication marketing or distribution.Victoria Strauss has used the examples of PublishAmerica and VDM Publishing to illustrate the concept of author mill.
[2] Typically, an author mill does the cheapest possible job of production; it sets high cover prices and prints its books "on demand".
[citation needed] The rise of the author mill is based on the rise of the online bookselling industry and digital printing technology which makes it cheap to print books on demand.