[darryl]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Of course, the whole "self-published stuff is all garbage" meme is purely a strawman argument. I haven't seen anyone say that self-published stuff is all garbage on this thread. What I've seen is people say that a lot of self published stuff is garbage and I don't want to filter through it, a very different point.

Quite right. No one, on either side of the discussion, has seriously argued on this thread that "self-published stuff is all garbage". Not even DiapDealer, who used it to illustrate a different point.

It seems to be common ground that without a gatekeeper there are a lot of self-published books which most of us would classify as garbage. Just what percentage, who knows. IMHO it is also true to say that there are a lot of self-published books which are not garbage. However, some clearly disagree with me on this, taking the view that there are only a small percentage of self-published books which are not garbage. DiapDealer clearly finds it amusing that some who take this view seek to justify it by excluding certain categories of self-published books. In the end it doesn't matter that greatly. Clearly even those who take the most extreme view acknowledge that there are self-published books worth reading.

Some posts say or sometimes imply, intentionally or otherwise, that it is a terribly onerous and time consuming task to find good Indie/Self-Published books. So much so that they prefer to stick to established traditional publishers. My personal experience is that finding good self-published books is neither terribly onerous nor terribly time-consuming. If your experience is different, I have no problem with it. Though I do believe you are missing out needlessly.

In replying to Mivo earlier I said I agreed with DiapDealer's #19, and therefore did not seek to repeat the points made in that post. But I find this paragraph particularly apt:

The "hoops" you speak of quite are huge. You don't even have to jump though them. You merely have to pay attention and look where you're walking while you stroll through them. Much like readers have always done. No one has ever, in the history of book-reading, been able to choose books at utter random and have a high degree of confidence that they would be satisfied with those random picks. There has always been self-vetting and personal research needing to be done in order to find satisfactory books to read. They never did fall out of the sky from traditional publishers into the laps of readers to be loved.

And this:

Nobody ever said; "Man, that book sucked. But I'm glad I read it because it was so, so, very competently edited."