There are no badges of honor in publishing

Authors are always wearing "self-published" or "traditionally published" as a badge of honor.

But there is no badge of honor. There is doing what's best for yourself, your audience, and the project. You're shooting yourself in the foot to think of your publishing journey in any other way.

I generally believe that you should learn, self-publish, and build a fanbase first.

However, that would have been terrible advice for Veronica Roth who broke out with Divergent and hit the market perfectly.

If she self-published there's very little chance she would have been 1/100th as successful.

It was great advice for Amanda Hocking, though, who used her self-published success to sign a seven-figure book contract which brought even more success to her self-published work.

Plenty of self-published authors are selling print rights to publishers in order to get into libraries and bookstores where 85% of books are still sold.

Or, they are self-publishing in English and selling the rights to their foreign boo…