[Prestidigitweeze]

It's a mistake to attribute intrinsic merit to an arbitrary marker like a hardbound edition or an author's having taken the conventional publishing route. Instead of talking about legitimate and illegitimate writers, let's talk about good and bad ones.

There's something to be said for a writer who maneuvers their way past the panoply of barriers to conventional publishing, and something to consider in the possibility that someone who self-publishes might have been too lazy or egotistical to take the harder track.

But there have been putrid books released by major publishers and life-changing classics that were originally published by vanity presses. The quality of any of those books is down to the individual writer's talent and resolve, not the particular publishing approach that allowed their work to be noticed.

If a writer proves to be an attention-seeking amateur, we can usually tell right off. That writer doesn't represent the important opportunity that self-publishing offers to everyone: the chance for new kinds of writers to be read -- writers whose work is so odd, difficult or conventionally unacceptable that it would never have been presented to us otherwise.

Small presses are often gateways between mainstream and self-publishing, and many of the great writers of the 20th century would have remained unknown to us without small presses.

In the 21st century, I think the same thing might prove true of web sites that promote writers who self-publish e-books.