Publishing, legacy or indie, is a vehicle, and you can't opine about whether someone has chosen the right vehicle if you don't know where she intends to drive it.
Print-on-demand and electronic self-publishing options have made it easy for anyone to set up a business as a publisher whether they know what they're doing or not.
I wouldn't encourage new writers to start off publishing through electronic media... it still isn't wide enough for the readership they would need to get a good start.
. I used to advise writers to just write their books and it will find a home, and suddenly that didn't seem as certain. I figured it was time to act. I considered a small press through RADAR, my literary non-profit.
I think most new writers are better off going with traditional publishers who will actually, at a minimum, edit your work, package it well, and market it for you.
Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.
I'll have to self-publish it because unless you're on the 'New York Times' bestseller lists, anthologies don't sell all that well. However, low sales to a big publisher are a major success to a small one!
When I started publishing - my first novel came out in 1990 - there were no options for publishing science fiction in Canada. There were no small presses, and the large presses simply would not touch it at all.
I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com.
I think the more avenues that open up when people want to publish, the better. Some of the authors that want to jump ship from the traditional houses and go on their own, you know what? Good luck. It's going to be a lot tougher than you think.
I think for a young journalist, it's better to write for the Web at the moment than it is for print.
Is it better to go indie and make bigger profits on each book, or stick with a print publisher's 6%-10% royalties? Since I never could figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up, I'm hedging my bets and working both sides of the street.
Choosing to publish work electronically myself is really a no-brainer.
Big publishers want you to change this and change that. I'd rather go to a little publisher - who needs the tsuris.
Fewer publishers mean you have a limited set of aesthetics, so you know who can and can't send your work to. You have more situations where you take the offer or don't get published or you learn to self-publish.
