Self-Publishing Poll

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

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?

Comments

[jenny_evergreen]

This is definitely part of it, but it doesn't quite explain the level of hostility of some people to me. I think there's a sense of "cheating" coming into play. Self-publishing, to these people, seems like taking a short cut around a lot of difficulties people assume they HAVE to go through, not least because they were TOLD that at some point.
It's the same sort of hostility reserved for those born to money, for example.
I was just talking with my spouse about how the technological revolution is changing things, including the rise of crowdfunding as a truly viable income option. As always, people are going to resist these changes, and I think one group will be this group, that feels like bypassing "traditional" publishing is "cheating".

[iamtheelfinpoet.livejournal.com]

This is an excellent comment. I 2nd all you say! :)