In reality, self-publishing isn’t either one. It is a tool. Like all tools, it has its strengths and weaknesses–and whether you use it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
Time, ease, and control. Traditional publication is hard. You have to convince an agent that your work is marketable. He has to convince an editor. The editor has to convince her publishing house. All these folks have to devote their time and labor to your work—and stake their careers on it.
It takes time. Even after your work is accepted, you wait—sometimes for years—before it gets to market.
It also takes away some control over your work. Your book will probably not be published in the form you consider perfect. Most editors expect changes. Sometimes they compromise. Sometimes they don’t.
The design of the book is also out of your hands. I’ve had publishers send the page design and cover art for my approval—but in one case, I had no idea what my book was going to look like until a box of the finished product arrived at my doorstep.
If you don’t want the hassle and do want the control, traditional publishing might not be for you. But before you decide, consider the rest of the equation.
Quality control and credibility. Say something bad about self-publishing, and inevitably someone will bring up a self-published book that was “better than the stuff in bookstores.” Sometimes they invoke Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Or they’ll mention traditionally published books that sucked—the Da Vinci Code is a favorite. One of my former teachers used to present his students with passages from novels—some fresh and compelling; others pallid and limp—and challenge us to identify which were self-published. You couldn’t tell.
But while a self-published book may be good—even brilliant—the average self-published book is not. Take a clear-eyed look not at a specific book or two, but at a large selection of self-published works, and the results are not pretty.
The problem is that anything—and by “anything,” I mean anything—can be self-published. Write a novel no one would dream of reading and you can publish it. Write the worst poetry in the history of humankind, and you can publish it. Write the word “mugwump” on a piece of paper, and you can publish it.
When I was working at a small publishing house in charge of the slush pile (the tsunami of unsolicited work that arrives daily in publishers’ offices), I was stunned at how poor the typical manuscript was. Not mediocre. Not in need of revision. Not unpolished but promising. But stinking, shake-your-head-in-disbelief awful. In those days, those dreadful bits of non-writing would disappear from sight once a few dozen publishers had rejected them. Today, they end up in print, self-published by their deluded authors.
Traditional publication isn’t a guarantee that a work is wonderful, but it provides some filter for the stuff that really doesn’t belong printed and bound. With self-publishing, there’s no filter at all.
Because of this, self-publication doesn’t have a lot of credibility with agents and editors. In fact, it can work against you. Whether this is fair is a matter of debate, but it is the reality.
So, it gets down to this. You can have the ease, speed, and control of self-publishing, but your lovingly crafted work will be published alongside the hopeless, clueless, and wretched of the Earth. Your work will not have much cachet in the writing community, but it will be out there in the way you want it to be. I know fine writers who’ve taken that route and found it absolutely the best way to go. I know others who won’t go there. Which you choose depends on your goals, your reasons for writing, and what you want to accomplish.