Подпочвам с един доста добър цитат от интервю на Самюъл Дилейни (didn't see that coming, did ya?), който ми се струва доста релевантен в ситуацията на бг-книгоиздаването.
Lukin: A theme of About Writing that has appeared in your earlier nonfiction but is rarely addressed in creative-writing guides is "the writer's reputation," in part as it relates to the structure of publishing. In the past five years, we've seen a renewed Delany presence in bookstores thanks to the Random House reissues of your early fiction; but notwithstanding your own work's renaissance, you advised writers at Clarion West a couple of years ago to consider self-publishing.
Delany: In 1979, basically some eighty-odd independently owned publishing companies operated out of New York City. By 1989, only five remained. Yes, there were many more than five names, but the overwhelming majority had been brought up by international monopolies—Bertelsmann, HarperCollins, Beatrice, global monopolies of that sort (Doubleday, Bantam, and Dell, and two or three others, for example, are now one company owned by Bertelsmann operating out of a single office at 666 Fifth Ave)—so that in terms of corporate ownership, there are only five. The spectacular collapse—or, better, displacement of ownership—of U.S. publishing during the 1980s is an event whose results have been repeatedly narrated. It upset the economic careers of many "mid-list" writers, such as myself. It's one of the major reasons why, at age 47, when I was offered a professorship, I accepted. Shortly before the offer, while I was a Fellow at Cornell's Society for the Humanities, at the Andrew D. White House, in 1986, I had watched most of my books go out of print, one every two weeks, as my major mass market paperback publisher, Bantam Books, radically revised its policy toward just the sort of writer I was.
It's not that before this collapse I advised students against self-publication and afterwards I advised them to try it. Rather, it's a case of what self-publishing came to mean in both situations. When there was a greater variety of commercial publishers and more economic competition between them, self-publishing was a way to avoid competition. It announced that you couldn't take the heat. That's why I advised against it, back then. At that point, nobody really took self-published writers seriously. Self-publishing was for books such as Thoughts of God, by John Francis, Forty Years a Backwoods Doctor, or (the title is Auden's) A Poultry Lover's Jottings.
Today, the collapse not only means that there's no real economic competition, but the kinds of things that publishers are looking for have changed. Commercial publishers today are far more distrustful of good writing than they have ever been before, and usually won't consider it unless it comes with some sort of ready-made reputation or gimmick. In the last half dozen years, writers have shown me rejection letters from publishers such as Harcourt Brace that actually say, under the letterhead, "We're sorry. This book is too well written for us." This means that competition is of an entirely different order than it was, say, thirty years ago, when such a letter simply would not have been written.
Because of computers, because of the Internet, you can self-publish at a level far higher than you once could. The product can look extremely professional. And if that's the kind of brick wall you've been bloodying your head against, small publishers and self-publication are, today, reasonable things to consider.