I'm sure there are some good self-published books out there, but...

I think every writer can remember that first magical moment where they were reading something and said, "Somebody published this?  This is awful.  I can write better than that."

The book I was reading was...you know what, I don't want to pick on the poor guy any more than the Amazon reviewers already have so I'm not going to mention the title.  But needless to say, it was awful.  It was so awful that I wrote my first short story immediately after reading it.

I suppose it's strange that it took seeing terrible writing to motivate me to finally start writing, but it had been a long time coming and that book was simply what pushed me over the edge and got me started.

What's interesting is that when I looked up that book again a year later I realized that I was wrong when I thought "Somebody published this?"  It turns out it was a vanity press, therefore nobody published it.

I don't want to bash on self-publishing; that's not my goal here.  But I do want to point out that books like that are a great example of why self-published fiction has such a bad reputation.  Now that literally anyone can write a book and "publish" it, the market is overrun by some awful fiction that should have never left the nightmares of the writers.

This is a big part of the reason I choose not to self-publish.  Due to the sheer volume of terrible self-published novels out there, it's hard to shake that reputation off, no matter how well-written your book may be.  I still think that self-publishing fiction makes you look like a writer who just couldn't make the cut.  I don't personally believe that, but I'm afraid the marketplace still does.

That might change in the coming years, but for now, I still think that with novels, traditional publishing (including small press) is the way to go in the vast majority of cases.

Now, I know it has its place and sometimes self-published writers can find a lot of success.  There are novelists that, for whatever reason, just can't get published in the traditional way, so they end up going into business for themselves and seeing if they can make it self-publishing.  For that I wish them well.

And who knows, if I can't find an agent this year, maybe I'll be joining their ranks.