If you search the internet these days for writing-related web sites or blogs, you'll soon find yourself immersed in talk of self-publishing, print-on-demand, e-books, and internet marketing. With few exceptions, these new developments are touted as a godsend for writers. Now, it would seem, writers need no longer go through the long and frustrating process of improving their skills, dealing with rejection letters, and trying to persuade commercial publishers that they've written something others would want to read. Now, you don't have to deal with those nasty, corporate gatekeepers who are trapped in the old paradigm. You can publish your own works with minimal start-up costs, and become a successful writer, all on your own. (Check out how many of these sites are selling a self-published book on how to sell self-published books.)

I tend to agree with Cory Doctorow, writing in the March issue of Locus. We live in a time when the pieces are coming together that could make new models of publishing and distribution workable, but simply sending your manuscript to Lulu or iUniverse and expecting to become the next Stephen King is not a viable strategy. Doctorow draws attention to the enormous labor involved in actually marketing a book to people who don't know you, all across the country or around the world. Distributors and brick-and-mortar bookstores are still an important part of this equation, despite the rise of the internet.

Print-on-demand technology has a number of important uses, but enabling fiction writers to succeed without professional editors, publishers, and marketing is not one of them. PoD is great for publishers who want to keep their back list available after the initial print run is sold out. It's also great for nonfiction niche markets, where the author is well-connected with the potential audience. (I was an enthusiastic iris grower for many years. If I had written a book aimed at serious iris hobbyists, who number a few thousand, it would not be a money-making proposition for a major publisher, but I could self-publish and advertise through the American Iris Society, where my name was known, and reach my target audience effectively.)

PoD also works if you're giving workshops, and want to sell your book to participants. It's also fine if writing is just a hobby for you, if you have no desire to build a reputation or earn income from it.

Where PoD self-publishing usually fails, however, is if you want your work to be read by people who don't yet know you. Victoria Strauss offers a sober summary of the how the hype falls short at Writer Beware. PoD books cost more per copy to produce, so the discounts and returnability book sellers require are not normally possible. Just sell on line instead? Listing on Amazon doesn't really help, if people don't know to look for you. Who goes to page 43 of the search results and picks a title at random by a writer they don't know? (Also, there are rumblings that Amazon may be clamping down on its self-published listings.) Even Indie Publishing, a devoted self-publishing advocate, acknowledges that there are problems self-publishing fiction.

If you are considering self-publishing, I encourage you to stop for a moment and consider how most people choose what to read. When I started writing science fiction and fantasy again after a long hiatus, I decided I should "catch up" with my reading in the genre. But what to read? Here's how I made my selections:

1. Hugo and Nebula award winners
2. Book reviews in genre magazines, such as Locus and Fantasy and Science Fiction
3. Books by authors whose earlier works I had enjoyed
4. Books by authors whose short fiction I had enjoyed in current published anthologies and magazines

Any self-published award winners? No.
Any self-published books reviewed in major magazines? No.
Any self-published books by genre writers already in print professionally? No.

Here's the bottom line as I see it. There are lots of people writing fiction. Lots. Very little of it will ever be widely read, just because there are not enough readers, not enough hours in readers' days, to read everything. Inevitably, only less than 1% of what is being written will ever be widely read—read by people who do not know the writer personally. So, somehow, there must be a filter in place, a funnel, some winnowing process. Traditional publishing provides that in the current world, for better or worse. Will that change? Quite possibly. There are a lot of pressures on the industry now. Will it change in such a way that there is no funnel, so that everything anyone writes can be widely read? No. It's a numerical impossibility.

My book Understanding the Tarot Court, published by Llewellyn, has about 9000 copies in print. Even now, five years later, I get royalty statements that show sales in the hundreds. I can go into Borders downtown and see it on the shelf. How many self-published authors can match even these very modest facts?

When visiting the web site of a self-published writer, note their book titles and look them up on Amazon. Note the sales rank. It's not an actual sales volume, of course, but it can give an idea. Compare the rank with that of similar commercially published books (subject matter, date of publication). Chances are, you'll find the commercial books with rankings somewhere in the thousands, and the self-published ones down below 1 million. Books ranked in the thousands are selling. Books ranked in the millions aren't.

So why, given these basics, is there so much attention being given to the idea that self-publishing is the magic route to fame and fortune? I think the answer is in human psychology:

1. The human mind cannot fully grasp large differences in scale. If a blog gets thousands of hits, it can seem that it's in the same league as a commercial publishing house or a professional writer's page. It's not. If marketing to 100 people is easy, marketing to 10,000 can't be that much harder. It is.

2. Writers, like other creative artists, often have sensitive egos. We pour something of ourselves into our work, we become vulnerable. And, yes, most of us desire approval and praise for our work. Going the professional publishing route is hard on the ego. Even good writers can expect dozens, hundreds of rejections, many of them impersonal. It's a great temptation to circumvent all that, and become a "published author" without enduring those blows. Reading between the lines on self-publishing sites, you can pick up a low-level defensiveness, a rejection of the rejectors.

3. Everyone likes to be part of the Next New Thing. We want to be on the leading edge, whether its Twitter, iPhone, or Kindle. If it's all the rage on the internet, we want to be a part of it.

I think it is these factors, more than the realities of the opportunities presented by self-publishing, that fuels most of the buzz today.