an article that offers bad advice

This article offers very poor advice. Key quote:

Here’s the problem with self-publishing: no one cares about your book. That’s it in a nutshell. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe. Many of those – perhaps as many as half or even more – are self-published. On average, they sell less than 250 copies each. Your book won’t stand out. Hilary Clinton’s will. Yours won’t.

So self-publishing is an exercise in futility and obscurity. Of course, there are the stories of the writers who self-publish and magic happens and they sell millions of books, but those are the rare exceptions. How rare? Well, on the order of 1 or 2 per million.

This is a tremendous logical fallacy, and I hear it over and over again about self-publishing.

Yes, you’re not going to sell a million books. But so what? There are many, many numbers between 0 and 1,000,000 and many of them are good numbers. Selling 100 books is pretty good. Seriously, what higher compliment can someone give your book than paying actual cash money for it? Especially in this craptacular economy?

By the article’s logic, if an unemployed man can’t land a job as a Fortune 500 CEO, he shouldn’t attempt to look for a job. Or if a man can’t run a marathon, he shouldn’t attempt to exercise at all.

Actually, now that I think about it, that’s very common logic.

But that kind of thinking is a tremendous self-limitation, and should be avoided. Do not make the perfect the enemy of the possible. The perfect would be nice, but the possible is usually pretty sweet.

-JM

(found via The Passive Voice)