[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by nashira

Absolutely luck is required - but a good book written doesn't mean you'll have it.

I never said it did. Luck is fickle, and quality of work is not a factor. If it was, I can think of some enormously popular works which wouldn't be with us today.

I understand there are people who prefer big houses because they filter but frankly I've been on the net since I was eleven and there's an even bigger amount of junk on the web than ebooks are likely to aquire for a long time and if I can filter the net for myself (and I don't just let google do it, I sometimes go through pages and pages and pages clicking all sorts of links) then I can decide in short order what books work for me.

How well that works depends on what you read.

I prefer big houses not merely because they filter out bad stuff, but because I trust their taste in good stuff.

In fiction, for example, my usual fare is SF and fantasy, and I give preference to stuff published by Baen (a small house, all told) and Tor (part of Holtzbrink, a very big house indeed) because I trust their taste (and probably know the editor who bought the book, too.)

But I read a lot of non-fiction as well. One example on my shelves is the paper volume of David McCullough's _The Path Between the Seas_, a history of the Panama Canal. It won the National Book Award for History and several similar honors. It's a brilliant piece of work. It was also the author's full time job for a couple of years, and happened because a big house (Simon and Schuster) had the resources to fund it and the vision to feel that they should.

You won't see something like that self published.

If writers are brave enough to put their stuff online for people, free, paid or otherwise. More the power to 'em, it's sort of like walking around without your trousers on.

I have no problem with people doing so, and I'm happy the tools are there to permit it. I just worry about the wishful thinking involved in too many cases.

I cheerfully recommend self-publishing to people who just want to write, put it out where people can get it, and are happy if a few people happen to do so. It can also be just the thing for specialized niche market works where there might be a few hundred people in the world who would have any desire to read it.

For anyone hoping to make actual money writing, self publishing is the last approach I'll recommend.

A publishing house putting out a doesn't even seem to mean proof read sometimes these days, I've found more spelling mistakes in some books than I have found in fanfiction.

Unfortunately, that's all too true. Proofreading is a skilled trade, and people who do it expect skilled labor rates. Everyone is trying to cut costs, and paying for such things is one of the steps increasingly omitted to do so.
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Dennis