Exactly. These sorts of "Always" messages end up being overly simplistic. People should approach it as a business decision and part of that includes risk. I rec

Exactly. These sorts of "Always" messages end up being overly simplistic. People should approach it as a business decision and part of that includes risk. I recruit a lot of authors into my publications and I'm hyper aware of the cases where we might not be offering a good deal. For example, for authors aspiring to write mainstream books, the size of their book advance is going to be heavily correlated with the size of their mailing list. So I always point out that these types of authors would be better off publishing first on their own site with an email collection CTA and then only secondarily republishing to other places like the pubs I run. However, not all authors have that goal and so they end up with totally different factors to weigh.