People like the quality of my work, and when I tell them “I did it all myself,” they are amazed. (Not that it is perfect, but good enough.)

More importantly, I have been spreading the word, quietly, to at least 3 more potential authors. Writers in general support each other, which is why I think we are pushing back against the “don’t go it alone” scare.

However, in parts of corporate America, the faintest breath of critism to someone that important to an imprint might mean the end of one’s job.

Ah…Mike has just confirmed my suspicions.

It takes too much time and effort to query agents and publishing houses, in my view…at least for me. I don’t have any problem with anyone going that route, but I don’t really envy them, either.

I recently skimmed Piers Anthony’s BUT WHAT OF EARTH? which isn’t so much a novel (Anthony refers it to a middling work in his intro) but an indictment of damage done by copyeditors and editors and rewriters. It’s interesting.

I suspect no one wanted to be the person to tell King he needed a re-write. Angering King would be job-sucide.

I agree. Many Indie authors were never rejected by big publishing.

They never bothered to jump through the Agent hoops in the first place.

You can’t get rejected (by big publishing) unless you actually GET to the desks of the big publishers.

This is something I’ve noticed about all these types of articles: everybody seems to be stuck at least two years in the past. I’m not sure what’s causing this, seeing how fast ebooks have changed over the last few years — in a very public way.

I know I have no hatred of traditional publishing. I found self-publishing while researching the latest news in publishing. I was out of work and figured I might as well see if I could become a writer (a life-long dream).

I never got around to submitting to a “real” publishing company, because I found Joe Konrath’s blog and got converted.

I have no great love for Amazon, or any retailer that I may chose to sell my books. It’s a business deal, which Ms. Miller and her ilk can’t seem to wrap their brains around.

It is very easy to write off snark and anger when you don’t know much about the people and their experiences. I am sure some folks are operating off of “a thimbleful of skewed information and a lot of incorrect assumptions” and others know more about the industry than you do.

When you say no one is against self-published authors, I wonder what you mean by that. I would say that a publisher who would prefer that self-published books be segregated from his and other traditional publishers’ books are against self-published authors. The fact that most of your author friends are hybrid tells me that your experience is decidedly not typical. In fact, you are a real outlier in this respect. Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that you should be careful about reasoning from that experience to the bigger picture.

With respect to prices, I think your perspective is preventing you from seeing the situation clearly. I have no doubt that your customers behave exactly the way you describe. That information may or not be relevant to most of the people here. Their potential customers may behave in a completely different way. Readers aren’t a single class who behave the same way. Individual readers don’t even apply the same analysis to different types of books. I will use my own behavior as an example.

I read 100+ fiction books a year. That makes me atypical, but there are a few million people like me in the U.S. I buy very few non-fiction books a year, but I often pay 10x per book for those titles. Do I value those titles more than the novels? I wouldn’t put it that way, but some people would see it that way. I don’t think of the non-fiction books as being in the same product category as the fiction I buy.

The issue isn’t whether or not readers pay more for books they believe are worth more (like all mental models that is partly true and partly false), the issue us whether that model of reader behavior is useful to self-published authors, small publishers, and the Big 5. The answer might be different for each group or even for different people in the same group. My analysis of reader behavior is that it is a generally unhelpful idea. It confuses the different types of value that different readers derive from books and leads to poorly informed decision-making. I don’t know your situation so I cannot say whether not it is harmful to you and I would encourage you to take a hard look at what value readers derive from the books you publish and where that value comes from.