Rachelle Gardner of the Wordserve Literary Group has an interesting post relating to self-publishing versus traditional publishing. Her answer to the question above is basically “no,” self-publishing will not necessarily hurt your chances of getting published traditionally. I have to agree with her. Self-publishing used to have a negative stigma to it, but over the past couple of years, it has become much more commonplace, especially with the increase and popularity of e-books.
Good quality eBook publishers could be extremely beneficial if you are interested in distributing your work around the world.
What are your thoughts?
I wonder if at some point publishers might look at a new author and ask, “What have you self-published?” Going through the process is enlightening and, IMO, shows initiative or at least a desire to delve deep into the culture, similar to the way maintaining a technical blog shows a deeper desire to learn outside the workplace (I’m a software engineer by day, thus the example).
Depends what you mean. If you mean future books, probably not. If you mean your current work up on Kindle and Smashwords . . . well, that might be different.
Sorry for my slow reply. I’ve been out of town.
Scott, I know you’ve worked hard on publishing your own novel. Would you recommend skipping straight to self-publishing or attempting to go through traditional publishing first? What was the most rewarding, and at the same time, frustrating part of the self-publishing experience?