Quote:
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Quit worrying about publication and master your craft. If you have a good story to tell and if you write it well, the Universe will come to your aid. Don’t self-publish. That’s as good as admitting you’re too lazy to do the hard work.
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I think there's a kernel of truth here. (of course by "truth" I mean "opinion I agree with"
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While I agree that self-pubbers are not necessarily any more lazy than trad-pubbers, and I don't believe there's some magical force called "the Universe" which helps conscientious writers, however I do think that focus on craft is important. It's also, ultimately, the thing which you have most control over. And I do think that generally good writing gets recognised in the end - however "in the end" may well be posthumously.
I also think that the rise of online self-publishing has allowed a lot of material which would never have got past the trad publisher's slush piles in the past. Now some of this is terrible and obviously terrible and so the issue it raises is one of filtering for the reader. The more interesting stuff is that which is mediocre to good but where the writer is capable of better, and the question is whether having to convince someone else to publish your work forces you to consider whether it could be better.
Of course most writers worth their salt will want to produce the best book they can but how many simply won't realise because the feedback they got from their beta readers and their editor (whom they're paying) was positive?
And of course that doesn't mean that trad-publishers are automatically going to be better at getting the best out of authors - but that doesn't negate the other side of the argument.
It's an interesting question and I don't think there's a black and white answer.