vanity press.
Another iteration is called an "Author mill". It can work. That said, results vary, but generally the best hope you have, if you seek a wider audience, is that you will be able to market yourself well enough to build a cult or small but noisy following, and that a regular publisher will pick up the manuscript. On the down side, you don't get the very real aid of either content editing or copy editing--if there are glaring errors stylistically or errors of fact, no one will tell you. Of course, a lot of people don't want to be told.
Umberto Eco wrote a book in which an "Author Mill" was the frame for the story-- The name is lost--was not the equal of "Foucault's Pendulum" at all, as I remember. "There is mysterious music in democracy, when people decide to believe in themselves." ---Bill Greider, The Nation.
Those authors who are trying to sell their wares while avoiding the gatekeeper function of the conventional publishers are, perhaps, not the best customers for this service, the per copy production costs are too high, but for others with specialized needs it may just be a perfect fit.
If you haven't looked at the site you should browse the "buy" tab and see the variety of materials people have created. Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
Getting into hardcopy certainly won't find you a market. Nor will it legitimise your ideas or give them authority or impact.
I think authors secretly suspect that's what hardcopy gives them, even if they're not necessarily aware of it consciously. And the vanity publishers - and Lulu isn't one, in the usual sense - deliberately capitalise on this with huge puddles of oily flattery.
In fact what mainstream publishing gives you is limited access to that legitimisation, and - more importantly - much wider access to potential readers through established marketing and distribution machines.
Some self-publishers do manage to create their own marketing and PR machines, but it's a ton of work, not cheap, and only sporadically effective.
Vanity publishing, however, is alive and well locally. A small press runs competitions, then sells high-priced, cheaply produced anthologies to the lucky winners. I was caught out by them a couple of years ago when they invited my daughter's school to take part in a competition, because you can't possibly say "No, you haven't really won a competition and it doesn't really prove your work's any good" to an excited ten year old who thinks she's getting published for real.
No, you buy a book for her, a book for yourself and a book for Grandma... :)
But a surprising number of adults fall for it. They turn up at local poetry events, announce themselves in loud voices to be competition winners and to have had a book published, then see what the real poets are doing and never come back.
