The other day at lunch, my friend - a writer and former journalist - raised a palm toward me to stop my monologue and said: "I don't get it! Why would anyone self-publish a book?"
I had just described the number of people I had attracted to seminars on self-publishing this year in the Midwest. Unlike my students, my friend expects to publish a book with a traditional publisher and snag a full-page review in the New York Times Book Review. To her, self-publishing is an admission of defeat, or at least an admission that your book isn't good enough to attract a "real" publisher.