Or a deeper question, are the publishers making your friends' lives easier by doing it first? Do your friends read thousands of self-published books to provide you with recommendations? Or is all their action applied after the mainstream publishers' filter?<p>I'm sure there is self-published stuff out there that is worth my time. Unfortunately, I don't want to read the literary equivalent of MySpace to find it.<p>A good publisher has a quality bar I can trust, and they've taken on the burden of reading unsolicited submissions. And as the blog post says, 75% of it is unreadable crap, 24% is readable but not worth your time, and 1% or less is quality and publishable. That's a lot of hours you and your friends would have wasted.