OK. Vanity publishing is where you hand your book over to a vanity press who print the book and do nothing else. They may promise you the world but in general you end up with a garage full of poor quality books. The book is ‘published’ in the loosest sense of the word by the vanity press. The writer pays the vanity press to turn their m/s into a ‘book’. A vanity press often sends a glowing letter and asks the writer for money. They will promise promotion but don’t do it. They make their money from the writer, not from book sales.
Self publishing is where the writer writes, edits and proofs the book. They may pay a professional editor to do the editing and proofing for them. Then they organise a cover and layout and send the book off to a printer. There’s no ego stroking involved <G>. Some self published books are of very high quality, some are not. Some will be picked up by a distributor and some will be sold (or not) by the author.
At the moment we’re selfpublishing a book in partnership with a NZ tramping club. It’s a YA novel about tramping safety which didn’t find a publisher but someone from the tramping club read it in ms and decided to talk to us about publishing it. The market is tramping clubs and school libraries. We’ve done the editing and proofing and my SO is doing the cover. Someone else is laying the book out in pagemaker and then we send it to the printer. Sir Edmund Hillary (yay!) wrote a foreword.
Can you see the difference? If that book were being vanity published we’d just send it off with a cheque to someone like Minerva Press. This book might or might not get reviewed – a book published by Minerva most emphatically would not be reviewed anywhere reputable.