Self-publishing grows and grows, despite the old stigma – Press Enterprise

The belief that all self-published books are poorly written, unedited and poorly designed is pervasive. And, yes, many of them are. Way too many. But some self-published books are great - as fine as those distributed by the big traditional New York publishers and better than some. One of the main reasons that authors self-publish good books is that they have too few years left in life or too little patience to go traditional. Most publishers will acquire only those books brought to them by agents, and finding an agent can take an author two years - or forever. Typically, agents will pick up two or three new authors out of every 2,000 manuscripts submitted to them. (It helps if the author is related to someone in the publishing industry or got an MFA from Iowa or Stanford.)