Vanity, all my spam these days is vanity

Basketball season has started for our county league.  That means #3 and 4 will think, and speak, of little else for the next couple of months.  It's okay, they spend a lot of time outside shooting and dribbling and we enjoy the games.  It's also a focus that I understand.  After all, last month I was hammering away for Nano.

And, much like basketball season, now that the contest is over I am still writing but the urgency has subsided somewhat.  (I just started a paragraph with 'and', must be still a bit undertheweather.)  Nano offers a "chest full of prizes" for winners and some of them are pretty good -- you could get storist for 50% off -- but there's nothing I need, or even especially want on the list.  What I want is more time, and the shiny new packages on offer promise just the opposite -- less time writing, more time poking around.

There are also several self-publishers that are offering "prize packs" and I'm not interested in those either.  I have nothing against self-publishing (okay, Vanity Press) but it isn't for me.  I do suspect, however, that they get a lot of business following Nano, after all, people put in a lot of work and the story always seems great when you are writing it.

I get a lot email these days from Vanity Press representatives.  Most of them remind me of the old "drawing contest" ads in the back of Car and Driver.  I got a new one today -- an outfit in Pennsylvania spotted my copyrighted piece and thought it might be the perfeect fit, I just needed to submit it and they'd get back to me.  There were a few things wrong with the email, and after a brief internet search to confirm my gut reaction, I deleted it, but it got me thinking about the power of playing to ego.  By suggesting that there was a submission approval process, that particular company was implying they were selective and better than the folks that offer 75% off deals.  But really, it's a vanity press, does anyone think they would actually turn down any customer?  It would be like a diner turning away a customer because he wanted a turkey salad sandwich on toast but could only pay in cash.  Nonesense.