Vantage Press was a publishing company based in New York City with an advertised office in Hollywood. The company was founded in 1949 and ceased operations in late 2012. Vantage was the largest

vanity press A vanity press or vanity publisher, sometimes also subsidy publisher, is a book printer that is paid by authors to Self-published, self-publish their books. A vanity press charges fees in advance and does not contribute to the development of the ...

in the United States. In 1955, they landed a title on the national best-sellers list for their first and only time; ''Jehova's Witnesses'' sold 100,000 copies. By 1956, they were publishing hundreds of titles per year. By 1958, they were facing legal problems, as the

Federal Trade Commission The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) United States antitrust law, antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. It ...

raised charges regarding their use of the term "cooperative" to explain their business model, when the author was actually paying all of the costs. In 1975, the average cost for an author was $4000. In 1990, the State Supreme Court in New York ordered Vantage to pay $3.5 million in damages to 2,200 authors it had defrauded. According to the plaintiffs, Vantage charged money upfront, but never promoted the books as the authors had expected. One former Vantage employee described what they offered as "a facsimile of publicity". Vantage's deals would stipulate the number of books printed, but many of those books were kept as unbound sheets, which could be bound if demand arose.

References

Self-publishing companies Book publishing companies of the United States Publishing companies established in 1949 Publishing companies disestablished in 2012 Defunct companies based in Massachusetts 1949 establishments in New York (state) 2012 disestablishments in Massachusetts {{US-publish-company-stub