Every time the subject of self-publishing is raised on the battlefield that is the internet, partisans appear, hundreds of miniature Robert Jordans (the Hemmingway character, not the author) racing behind enemy lines to blow up their bridge for the Greater Cause. There are two factions, roughly: the New Kids, the great unwashed, the publishing equivalent of the webcomic crowd (“build an audience with content, promote the hell out of yourself, rock the platform & sell t-shirts”), and the Wonderful System, in which an interlocking cosmos of agents, publishers, editors, publicists, etc. spin about one another like the crystal spheres of old astrology, ensuring the happiness of the literary world.
There’s a surprising amount of vitriol from some members of the Wonderful System toward self-publishing, which they see not as a generative technology but as a last resort for people who can’t succeed in any other way. Maybe they’re right; I haven’t read many self-published books, so I’ve got no sense of their overall quality (though I have read many self-published comics, some of which are great and some of which are less so and some of which are crap). However, I find these protestations funny, because they’re delivered overwhelmingly on blogs.
What is a blog, dear readers? There are no covers, no dead trees, but make no mistake, blogs are self-publishing at its purist: self-publishing generally of nonfiction and of ideas and of criticism and of links to neat things my friends have done, but self-publishing nevertheless, and some bloggers succeed (measured by readers or by financial reward) through this model. The modern nonfiction bookshelf is full of ex-bloggers and collected blog books, and even fiction has begun to make the transition (though I’m aware of fewer success stories there).
That’s what I find funny about the whole exchange: the fact that these arguments about self-publishing could not take place save for the very medium being discussed, and that neither proponent nor opponent tends to take pause to consider this fact, and what it means for the world of media as a whole.