That’s all it is, you know. You should know, by now, what vanity publishing is (and know, of course, never to go anywhere near it) and Spines is such a blatantly obvious vanity-publishing scam that it’s surprising how many publishing-industry types are fanning themselves and wringing their hands over it. Of course they are happy to promise all the hopeful would-be authors ‘100% of the royalties’ because 100% of fuck all is always going to be fuck all. No one is going to *buy* these books. The Spines team don’t care that no one will buy the books, because they make their money off the hopefuls who ‘wrote’ them, just as vanity publishers have always done. The Spines team probably don’t even use what AI machines they might have leased for anything more than composing gushy emails about the wonderfulness of any submitted work, which are sent to the aspiring novelist along with the substantial bill. They certainly aren’t going to read the submitted stuff – why would they?
I am still not sure there is any cohort of sheep as easy to shear as the cohort of people who ‘dream of being a writer’. For all Amazon’s business empire’s many, many faults, you can’t slate their self-publishing facilities: it is perfectly possible to publish your book via the Zon for… hardly any money at all. There are plenty of other grifters hanging off their coat-tails, from the unqualified ‘editors’ charging thousands via some crappy website with fake testimonials to the
tiresome influencers and promoters popping up in every newbie author’s inbox offering places in the bestseller list (not that they ever specify WHICH such list) in exchange for pots of money.
Maybe it’s because writing books is hard work, and marketing your book yourself is even harder work, but the fact remains that most of those wanting to charge big sums to help you realise your author dreams are promising you just that: dreams. The quality of your work is irrelevant as far as they are concerned, all they want is your money. And they can’t make you a famous, successful author even if what you have written is good, because they are going to put in the same minimal effort whether you’re good or utterly rancid. You’ll pay them anyway.