There’s a lot of debate about whether it’s best to try for a publishing deal with one of the big houses . . . or go with self-publishing (sometimes called independent publishing). Many authors I work with still yearn for the prestige of being published by one of the Big 6—Penguin, Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Georg von Holtzbrinck/Macmillan (soon to be the Big 5 because Penguin and Random House are merging).

But are emerging authors yearning for what they’ll get from these big houses, or for what they would have gotten some twenty years ago? Just as everything on the planet is in constant change, so is the face of publishing. Big advances, book tours, publicity? If you’re a celebrity maybe.

The thing is, whether you self-publish or get picked up by a publisher, the responsible party for getting your book out there is . . …