James D. Macdonald says, "Money should always flow towards the author",[6] a concept sometimes called Yog's Law.
[7][dead link] However, a true hybrid publisher is selective in what they publish and will share the costs (and therefore the risks) with the author, whereas with a vanity press, the author pays the full cost of production and therefore carries all the risk.
The Society of Authors (SoA) and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) have called for reform of the hybrid/paid-for publishing sector.
It is often stated that many famous authors, such as Mark Twain and Jane Austen, have used vanity publishers.
Vanity presses often engage in deceptive practices or offer costly, poor-quality services with limited recourse available to the writer.
However, when an author submits his work, he is told it does not quite meet the standards required for traditional publishing, but that the company will still publish it if the author pays for something—engaging their professional editor, committing to buying a large number of copies of the book, or another similar excuse.
In reality, the exorbitant fee charged for these services will fully cover the vanity publisher's costs for producing the book.
A notable example is ARK Music Factory, which, for a fee, produced and released Rebecca Black's 2011 viral video "Friday".