Check out this video about self-publishing from my new hero, Mr. Darryl Sloan.
“The real judge of you as an author is not these editors, it’s your readers.”
“Self publishing is the salvation of the publishing industry.”
–Darryl Sloan
http://darrylsloan.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/a-positive-perspective-on-self-publishing/
R.J. Keller 
I love this video! And I like what he says about art vs. business. While selling something into the marketplace obviously is about business, the bottom line is… I’m going to write what I want to write. And I’m going to put it out there.
It may have been true at one point that if something wasn’t commercial enough that it was pointless to do it. But the cost barriers are way down, and that lowers the numbers of copies one has to sell to break even.
Also, in a global market place, it doesn’t really matter what you’ve written, if it’s good and has an audience anywhere, with some ingenuity and persistence, you can reach that audience on the internet.
Frankly I think self publishing is a noble cause. The fact that so much of it is empirically bad is immaterial to me. It’s irrelevant. My book has nothing to do with that.
I can’t say that it is a “masterpiece,” that’s something I’ll always be striving for, but I can say it’s not empirically awful and I do believe it has a market and that I can reach it by thinking outside of the box in how I approach readers.
Thanks for featuring my video, RJ!
Darn it. My sound doesn’t work. I am out of the loop. 😦