> * Reputation. It can just feel cool to say "Oh yeah I have a book published by Tor" (or whatever). This one is pretty weak for me. Trad publishers don't hold

> * Reputation. It can just feel cool to say "Oh yeah I have a book published by Tor" (or whatever). This one is pretty weak for me. Trad publishers don't hold that much special prestige anymore. I think it's a validation thing, largely. If you get trad-published but the book does poorly—well, at least you got trad-published, so you must not be too awful (although... if you're in certain "hot" niches, there's some real crap put out, that looks like it was barely even edited), but your book just didn't land well. It happens. But you're an author, for sure. If you self-publish and your book doesn't do well—did you market poorly? Would it have done better with a trad publisher? Are you... in fact so terrible at writing you shouldn't call yourself an author, and it didn't sell because it's total crap? You may never know! Since there's not real, real money in it unless your book's such a hit you get movie deals and such (with rare outliers who make it big-enough purely on book sales but don't get adaptation interest) it's largely about being an author, so having that validation up-front has real appeal.