It’s a Friday night happy hour and I’m enjoying myself at the M Casino. It’s a nice, modern venue only five miles from my home her in Sin City.

Turns out that another author is there sipping wine. We strike up a conversation and I ask her about her first novele. She admits to having used a subsidy press. Intrigued, I ask her about the results and her mood noticeably changes. She had to alter every page because the company’s site couldn’t accurately read her file (generic Microsoft Word, she assures me).

The lesson here: Like anything else, you get what you pay for. Fast, cheap, and good: pick any two of the three. And sometimes you’ll only get one of them.