Too many authors tell us that they publish via a subsidy/vanity house because they "can't be bothered" with details like ordering their own ISBNs. The subsidy houses go by a bunch of misleading aliases, such as "POD publisher", "self publishing company", "author services company" or sometimes just "POD. But if you pay them to publish the book under their imprint an using their ISBN, then they are a subsidy. If they pay your a "royalty" instead of just charging you for printing/fufilling the books then they are a subsidy.

Two other things subsidy authors  apparently can't be bothered with:

1. Making money, or at least breaking even.

2. Getting wide readership.

Subsidy presses make it easy to publish a book but hard to sell it.  The  pricing on even the cheapest subsidy costs twice what it would cost to print and fulfill via a POD printer such as LSI. And meaningful prepublishing reviews with the big five prepub reviewers are just not availalbe to subsidy published books. With narrow margins you can't sell via bookstores or Amazon Advantage. A distributor is out of the question.

Most subsidy books fail in the marketplace. Bluntly most are not worth publishing in the first place. The subsidy house makes money from authors and sales to those authors. But what if you succeed? What if your book takes off and you start racking up sales? Now you are in even worse shape. To get decent margins you need to take over the publishing of your book.  You may need to print offset.  But once you have published subsidy you are more or less stuck. The favorable publicity attaches to the ISBN, and the ISBN is the property of the subsidy publisher. The same goes for the interior layout, the cover art, and so on.

The more glowing the promises the worse the deal.  Bottom line, don't publish subsidy.

The best of the worst are these three, in order of preference.

Booklocker.com

Lulu.com

Infinity.com

Here is the four P formula of success in self publishing, and some starting steps:

Your first step is to learn the business. You wouldn't attempt to open a restaurant or auto repair shop without studying the business carefully. The same applies to self-publishing. Getting your book in print is very easy, often too easy.  Selling books is increasingly difficult, in part because there are so many published every year.  So you must do your homework. 

There are many resources incliding mailing lists and internet searches. But

if you plan to publish books it is essential that you read some books on the subjects of marketng and self-publishing. Here is the url for my short list of books to buy, read and reference throughout your project:

http://wexfordpress.com/tex/shortlist.pdf

Remember, your book may be a lifelong dream but it is also a product. Authoring and self publishing your work may be your form of self-fulfillment but it  is also a business. If you care about profit or even just readership you need too do it right.

First P. PLAN your project, including marketing, product production, review strategies, and printing.

Second P. PRICE out your production and distribution costs, including printing, fulfillment, discounts and price your product accordingly.

Third P. PRODUCE your product, including writing editing,  layout, typesetting, indexing,  and most important cover design.  Some of this you can do yourself and some you should farm out. LIke anyone in business you are faced with "make or buy" decisions. The battle is always between product quality (good) and production costs (bad).

Fourth P. PUBLISH, executing your printing, marketing and fulfillment plans.