Myth of the Indie Author

From a comment on a literary blog:

The author whose meticulously updated webpage, whose self-orchestrated tour, whose plucky barrage of letters to every book review editor in the country, combine to elevate her book above the others, is a particularly tenacious urban myth, with perhaps a few exceptions to prove the rule. Such activity can’t hurt (though I think it probably tends to enhance the pernicious sense that authors are competitors, rather than colleagues), but in my experience it mostly serves to alleviate anxiety and to maintain the sense of control over one’s book that begins to dissipate when the last set of corrected galleys is returned to the publisher.

Dan Green comments:

,,,(I)f the publishing of fiction were to move farther toward self-publishing as a viable mode, the need for writers to become marketers and promoters would no doubt become even more acute. But it’s the publishers themselves who have brought things to this pass, and it won’t do to let them off the hook by claiming they’re “book-focused” rather than “author-focused” and noting they’re “juggling hundreds, maybe thousands of authors.” If they’ve let their business practices spiral out of control, whose fault is that, exactly? Should we really compound this failure by now chastising those writers who haven’t yet gotten with the new program and become their own publicists? The “marketing” crisis is a failure of capitalism, yet another example of its increasingly crude, bottom-line mentality, with the marketing of books now being outsourced to the writers themselves. Should we cheerfully give in to this?