If you make people pay for a bad quality story just so they can give you feedback, they'll be furious. This is the biggest problem with self-publishing, most writers do it just because they can, not because their work is worth sharing. If you want to "test the waters" open a blog for free and make it accessible to anyone to leave a comment. If it's any good, or no good, you'll hear from someone sooner or later. Self-publishing should be only for polished works, that are as absolutely perfect as you can make them. Otherwise, the whole system is drowned in the sea of c..p and everyone is considering self-publishing the same as vanity publishing
I can definitely understand where you are coming from. I wouldn't want to push out incomplete or bad work to paying customers. After some thought I believe that self-publishing should definitely not be a testing ground for new writers. However, I do think it's a good option instead of trying to get attention from big publishers right off the bat.
