In some senses you're right, in that great art is usually created by ignoring the conventional wisdom etc. However, even then feedback is important: as Paul Gr

In some senses you're right, in that great art is usually created by ignoring the conventional wisdom etc. However, even then feedback is important: as Paul Graham has repeatedly argued, great artists don't usually work in total isolation (the Renaissance was concentrated in Florence, etc). However, my point applied more to non-fiction than fiction: it was based on my own experiences writing Flexible Rails (self-publishing, getting early customers and feedback, etc) and then Hello! Flex 4 (traditional publisher approach). And we even did release Hello! Flex 4 while it was being written, but I didn't build the community of "earlyvangelists" around it that happened with Flexible Rails. Part of this was the content (Hello! Flex 4 is an uncontroversial introductory book; Flexible Rails was arguing something and was something largely new), but part of it was affected by the dynamic of self-publishing vs. using a traditional publisher. With Flexible Rails I created a Google Group that had hundreds of readers, while the book was still in-progress. I felt I had a closer connection with them, and I learned what worked and what didn't work in my book, etc. So that post was about those experiences. Finally, a disclaimer: I'm not an artist, and certainly not a Dostoyevsky, so I really have no idea what kind of feedback that type of talent wants. (P.S. I love Dostoyevsky btw; I read Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov while working a summer job in university at Walmart -- before I switched from Philosophy to Comp Sci.)