William,

Thanks for reading and sharing these thoughts. I think you've nailed it. Editing is an art, and I've personally found my books are best and go farthest when its a group effort.

One of the inspirations for writing this was the brief time I spent on Threads (Zuckerberg's version of witter) which I found inundated with self-published authors calling themselves "Indie" instead of "self published." They claimed the latter had a stigma. I also saw lots of upset over people not respecting self-published work for exactly some of the reasons you cite -- poor editing, etc.

I tried to make the distinction -- I'm "indie," but I'm not self published -- and found it either fell on deaf ears or elicited debate. But "indie" is really its own category. Which I try to spell out here.

I was lucky in my career. The small digital-first publisher I started with in 2014, Joffe, has grown into the biggest independent publisher in the UK. Getting in somewhere now is likely more challenging than it was a decade ago. But it's still an order of magnitude better odds publishing genre fiction with the indies than with the trads!

TJ