Quoth Entrepreneurial Spirit: “Given all I’ve heard and read about how horrible traditional publishing is with shitty odds and no support, why shouldn’t I just self-publish my book and take control of the process myself? I’ve got some experience in marketing that might help.”

Thanks, Entrepreneurial Spirit, for the opportunity to offend hundreds (okay, dozens) of potential readers by saying that self-publishers might as well scream their work into a toilet to reach about the same audience.

I kid, I kid. Sorta.

A big issue we all face as creators today is signal-to-noise ratio: how can you make your work stand out so an agent will notice it, so a publisher will buy it, and a reader will read it when you are competing with a cacophony of other media.

I can understand the temptation to skip those middlemen and strike out with good old American ingenuity to blaze your own trail. If you can do anything well in our culture – bake cookies, sculpt gnomes in ice, smell death in the wind – someone will suggest you do it for money. That’s not always a terrible thing…just a challenging one when everyone else is doing it, too.

The odds are terrible regardless of how you publish. Media of all kinds gets cranked out, tossed to the pack of ravenous dogs, and then quickly forgotten. That applies no matter who does the delivery of the content.

…but if you could increase your odds by 0.000004% with traditional publishing, isn’t it worth trying?

Why scream into that toilet alone?

Once you find an agent for your book and your agent finds a publisher and the marketing department decides your book is worth the investment, there is at least a chance that the publisher will do at least SOMETHING to help promote the book.

As a self-publisher, you do all of that yourself, mostly from a box in the trunk of your car as you drive to bookstore after bookstore where each owner chases you away with an umbrella raised like a cudgel.

Things a traditional publisher can help you do with varying degrees of commitment and success:

• Edit and proofread the manuscript to a professional level.
• Hire and pay for a professional cover artist instead of going to Shutterstock.
• Drive your book into the bizarre distribution system so that it will actually appear in real bookstores and be easy to order.
• Provide some support for special displays or book tours if it is especially noteworthy or timely or you’re really good looking.

And the most important thing traditional publishing can do:

• Dissuade you from publishing something crappy that will embarrass you for the rest of your living days.

I’ve been published professionally now for twenty years and received hundreds of rejections. How many of those do I regret?

Zero.

Why? Because every rejection is either a mismatch with the wrong venue (good to know) or an indication that the work isn’t special enough yet for an audience (even better to know). I’m thankful for editors who said – usually politely – “Yeah, no.” They caught me trying to get away with lesser work.

Are there any circumstances when self-publishing is a good idea? Sure.

• You have a large built-in audience beyond your family that will buy your work.
• You have a large catalog of previously published work that hasn’t appeared lately but still has fans.
• You’ve written something so niche that no publisher exists that can or would handle it (your monograph on, say, scrimshaw-carved sex toys).
• You’ve written something so extraordinarily bizarre and revolutionary that no corporation would risk the damage to its own reputation or the stability of capitalism to publish it.

There are success stories among self-published writers, just as every week, some redneck wins the lottery. Of course, those rednecks usually end up going broke or getting murdered for their bejeweled Cadillac Escalades.

The publishing world isn’t always great, and yes, they often fail to find or promote great talent.

But they can still do it better than you can, and it’s worth giving them a shot so you can complain from bitter experience like the rest of us.