I came across an article called ‘How To Self-Publish A Bestseller: Publishing 3.0‘ by James Altucher. It talked about his recent success with his latest book ‘Choose Yourself‘, but that is not what I was mainly interested in. What I was interested in was that he mentioned today’s publishing isn’t divided between self-published and traditionally published books anymore, but divided between professional and unprofessional.

It got me thinking at how the industry has changed in recent times. While I’ve only recently come into it (last couple of years) I have not had the opinion that self-published books hold the stigma that seemed to come with self publishing simply because I entered at a time when there are good quality self-published stories that can be accessed by a large amount of people.

In the past people had the idea that the way a book was published dictated the actual narrative quality inside. But any person who reads a lot of books will come across traditionally published books and think ‘how did this piece of shit get published?’

I know I have.

It amazes me that such poorly written/expressed/edited or just plain terrible stories ever make it past the first round in a publishing house. Did everyone involved have a brain aneurysm or something? Come one guys! You have access to more resources than a single individual, and yet you somehow end up with dribble.

But in today’s world it is not where you publish or the platform that you publish on. It is how you publish it. Have you done it professionally or unprofessionally? Have you taken you time to edit and re-write bad sections of your novel?

Overall people now look at the quality of something, not where it came from.