I will never self-publish; even if it means spending the entirety of my life writing without one sale, I'll just content myself with sharing my work with family members and try to be satisfied.

Whoa, let’s slow down and unpack that for a second. It’s not either sales or self-publishing — plenty of respectable people have done both. There are plenty of bad reasons to self-publish, but there are good ones, too; read the Scrivener’s Error post and you’ll see some pretty good analysis of the tradeoffs. The most important thing is to go in with your eyes open — which vanity press customers don’t, or they’d self-publish instead.

Also, if you’re even thinking about the prospect of an entire life without one sale, stop and take a deep breath; you’re getting overexcited. Other than dying young, there is no reason — I didn’t say that loudly enough; let me try again — there is NO REASON why someone who can read, and who is genuinely interested in learning to write well, should have to spend his or her life that way. I’m not saying you’ll be Stephen King, but if you’re willing to put in the time to figure out what makes a good story tick, and willing to apply what you figure out to your own work, you should be able to sell something.

Guess I've got a lot to learn about self-publishing. I thought it was for those who simply lacked the skills necessary to impress a publisher/agent. I don't intend to demean anyone's choice to self-publish, but I always felt it was a kind of copout, a surrender to the fickle market. Admittedly, I know next to nothing about the particulars of either vanity or self-publishing. My only experience with such endevors consists of seeing those sad writers downtown hawking books from the backs of ancient Toyotas. I'll read the link you posted and see if that changes my views.

-- david j.

One of the really good reasons for self-publishing that i've seen is books written by elderly family members about their life experiences - autobiographies with an audience limited to the couple hundred members of the immediate family. (A couple members of my extended family have done this; the ones that I have read have been fascinating to me but would probably be unbelievably boring to anyone who isn't either a family member or a historian focusing on the "common man" of the early twentieth century).

Of course, we're necessarily talking exceptions that disprove the rule here (which is important), but there actually are a couple of noteworthy recent successes that started out as what is traditionally seen as self-publishing.

I think you can still view this recent article from the New York Times about a writer named Heru Ptah who was selling copies of his book on the subway when he sold one to an MTV books editor who almost immediately bought it. The really amazing part of this story is that he figures he sold almost 10,000 or so books on the subway. Wow, huh? (If that article won't open, just google the author's name.)

And then, of course, there's Christopher Paolini.

And we're not even talking about the web and where that could push things -- cutting out the publisher entirely, or at least for a good while. Interesting times for publishing.

(Disclaimer: I'm not saying I want to read any of these.)

One thing Mary Anne has pointed out to me is that to be even mildly successful at self-publishing books, you may need to work really hard at promoting your own work. It's not just a matter of doing the writing and then creating the bound paper copies of the book; the fact that you have a bunch of copies of your book doesn't mean that people will seek you out to buy them. You may have to call bookstores, travel, sell your books on subways, talk to distributors, write advertising copy, etc -- without marketing and distribution, nobody will know your book exists or be able to obtain it. But yeah, there are writers who do this well and who make some money at it.

...I think some of the terminology you're using may be a little confusing, David, in that you don't mention the model in which a writer goes into business as a publisher, publishing their own work and selling it. In that situation, the writer is paying the printer to print the books, but the writer is the publisher; I think that's at least as common a model for "self-publishing" as the model in which the writer pays a publisher to publish books which the writer then owns and can distribute.

Then there's Jim Munroe, who turned down a contract by HarperCollins for his second novel and self-published it (in Canada. 4Walls8Windows picked it up for the U.S., but that was no sure thing). Your mileage may vary of course, but Jim's a smart guy and he's doing fine with it (as well as his third novel, which was also self-published). I think he's in Europe now peddling his wares. Not a bad gig. His website is:

http://www.nomediakings.org

which has a lot of good info.

Jed brings up a good point about promotion of your own work -- and I think that goes for self-publishing and traditional publishing too. This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Many writers seem to feel once they've sold the book that their promotional work is done, but in reality, writers have to take on some of this responsibility -- rather than entrusting their careers to overextended publishing houses who are going to choose a few books to get behind with publicity and the others get practically nothing. Maybe this shouldn't be so, but I really think it is.

That sounds like John Perry Barlow’s argument that you should give away the music and sell the concert tickets. That’s fine if you’re Peter Gabriel, but it’s not so cool if you’re Jyoti Mishra.

— Okay, it’s not very much like that. But unless you’re lucky enough to be Jay Lake, as gifted at — and enthusiastic about — the marketing as you are about the writing, why should you have to pimp the book yourself? Why not pay someone else to do it for you?

And if the publisher’s not doing that — what are you paying them for?

I absolutely agree that writers should not have to do this -- and I could list many and varied names here who we all would probably agree are brilliant and shouldn't have to think about this stuff (and who have suffered setbacks because of it, or bad treatment at the hands of publishers) -- but I still think they do. It's reality. If writers can afford to pay a publicist to promote them, great -- they're probably still going to have to participate in the process.

Small Beer was mentioned earlier here and I think Kelly and Gavin (especially Kelly) have worn the interstates of this country thin, along with any number of other things, to promote the SB books -- which is one of the reasons they are so successful.

I suck at promotion of my own work, but I realize that eventually, I'm going to have to learn how to do it. Or risk being the tree in the forest that no one even knows is there, whether it falls or not.