It seems to me that neither side has any conclusive proof. For some people electronic self-publishing has worked well, but nobody has presented any figures showing it's more likely to lead to success than the traditional route, nor any showing that it's less likely.
Princess Poppy only sold 40,000 copies before her author was signed up. In the UK in orderfor a publisher to be interested you need around 2,000 sold. A library visit here will often sell 40-90 copies of a book. So 10 library visits and you are halfway there almost lol And I have to ask Art, 'Are you free?'
OK, I'm going to chime in with random opinionating: Imagine that you're trying to publish fiction (I'm ignoring the self-help book theory), and you're getting detailed, personalized rejection letters, and occasional requests for partial or full manuscripts, and maybe some feedback on those as well. In that situation, I'd say that you _might_ be in the position where your book is good and interesting and readable, but won't be profitable enough for a publisher to take a risk on it. After a few years of that situation, it might be worthwhile to start considering whether you want to publish the book yourself. You almost certainly won't make any money to speak of, but at least you have _some_ evidence that your book is worth reading. If I were in this situation, I would write something else and plan on trying the other work again later, but, yeah, I could see self-publishing as being something to consider, if I really didn't care all that much about getting a broad audience for the book. But if you're getting generic, boilerplate rejections, with not a word of specific feedback on your work, then I'd argue that your book is probably simply not good enough. Not good enough to be published professionally, not good enough to publish yourself, simply not good enough. The few self-published books that I've sampled were almost certainly examples of the second situation - they never should have been published. I'm sure that their authors thought that they were great, and that the publishing industry just wasn't ready to hear what they had to say, or that their masterpiece wasn't commercial enough. I'm sure that the authors thought that self-publishing those books was a blow for freedom and creativity and a way to break the power of the publishing industry. Those authors were wrong. The books simply weren't good. I'm not an advocate of silencing creative people whose creative works don't meet a professional standard. I greatly approve of amateur creativity. However, I don't think that amateur creativity likely to get much of an audience in situations where that audience has to commit money or a non-trivial amount of time to experience those creative works. If self-publishing is going to have any real success, it's going to have to solve the quality problem. It's possible that some form of utterly reliable rating system could truly make a difference and make self-publishing a more realistic option, by making it possible for potential readers to pick out the one book in several hundred that's really good, but as far as I can tell, it's not there yet. ChickenFreak
I toyed with the idea of releasing my novel for free, just to get people interested in the idea but that was about a year ago and I'm at the point now where I'm going "what was I thinking?" Here's the thing, finding an agent/publisher to take on your book seems just as hard to get noticed as releasing it for free. There are a ton of free books in the kindle store and some of them in the top 100 have 3 stars or less. If an agent or publisher won't take on your book after months of searching you shouldn't let that get you down. There might be a number of reasons why such as: Poor query/synopsis Not the right genre Too risky for the publisher to take on. Right now, the publishing market seems to be holding back on their risk taking efforts. If you want to get noticed, instead of releasing the whole thing for free, try releasing a chapter or two and see if it gets them hooked. Or even start a website/blog that gains interest. Having hundreds of followers eager to read your work will speak louder than any other query letter by itself.
I would at least mark it to .99 cents. The advent of Kindle is giving self-publishers a lot more personal freedom than traditional self-publishing. And if you're going to make your work available to download just to get it out there, you should at least give yourself some chance of paying yourself for your hard work. Plus, I've been told this a number of times when marketing myself as a tarot reader, and I believe the same holds true of anything you write. People tend to put as much value into a product as you do. If you price to low, or give it away, people will think you don't take it very seriously. If you price too high, obviously you will be out of reach. For example, I saw a book on Lulu.com that's priced at over a thousand dollars. (If they ever get ahold of what that writer is smoking it will have to be destroyed from space, just to be sure.) Like I said, at least consider pricing it at something reasonable.
