crowdfunding | Self-Publishing Poll

ysabetwordsmith pointed out this poll on self-publishing, which I visited briefly. After reading a handful of the comments, I was struck by their violence: there's a lot of emotion there in the people denouncing the practice of self-publishing.

ysabetwordsmith said about that: "Any instance of extreme hostility raises the question of why people are being so violent about it."

I think that's a good question. Why do you think some of the people opposed to self-publishing are so hostile about it?

Edit: Please note, I'm not really interested in debating the profitability of the publishing industry. What I'm trying to understand, primarily, is why there's so much vitriol leveled by writers and readers at self-published authors (as in one of the commenters who said of self-published authors that they can "call themselves authors" but they never will be real ones). This kind of extreme behavior strikes me a strange. Particular coming from writers to other writers. And readers—that makes no sense at all. If they don't want to read self-published work, they can just... not read it. Why the anger?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

No few of them are dead, now, sadly. It's hard to expand my knowledge of the history of a genre when the original authors are no longer around to ask for reprints, and the books are not yet old enough to be considered classic works of art.

Of course publishing companies (of all types) would like to make money... and with print on demand, if there is no demand, there is no printing. But if there is demand, then printing can be done, even if it's a small or obscure market.

But in a traditional publishing set up, if a book does not sell at least a certain percentage of the first print run or two, then there's no reason for a traditional publishing house to keep publishing it. Even if there is a small group interested, it will not keep up with the cost of the unsold books that are pulped.

Self-Publishing Poll

Re: Hmm...