Publishing Myths Versus Reality

• Publishers actively seek new, exciting authors. Publishers will always choose the safe over the adventurous, the well-known non-writer over the talented unknown writer, the book a bit like last year's surprise hit. Brace yourself for a flood of soft porn after the success of Fifty Shades of Grey.
  
  
• Self-publishers, except for a few outliers, don't sell books to anyone except their friends and relations. While we are not all Hugh Howey, who has just announced his novel Wool is to be made into a film by Ridley Scott, many indie writers are selling well and making money.
  
  
• All self-published authors need professional editing and proofreading. Some do, some don't. Check the sample before you buy.
  
  
• Don't self-publish, as you will use up the first rights to your book, after which no publisher will touch it. Too many indie books have been snapped up by publishers after selling well for anyone but the most credulous to believe this any more.
  
  
• Publishers will market your book, saving you the trouble. Publishers will market the socks off your book if they have paid a big advance for it. Otherwise, you are likely to find yourself on your own, just like an indie author.
  
  
• Agents are looking for books they love. Agents are looking for books they can sell to the publishers they work with, as they occasionally admit in rave rejections.
  
  
• Your book will be on sale in bookshops as long as there is a demand for it. After a few months, copies of your book will be returned to make way for newer books. But this does not mean you can easily get the rights back, as it will always technically be available as an ebook and online.
  
  
• Amazon is bad because it is selling books cheaper than publishers want them sold, and in the end this will make books more expensive, which is bad for readers and authors, so publishers want to sell books more expensively now, which will be good for us all in the long run.  Who knows what will happen in the long run? I'll take cheaper books now, please.
  
  
• If you have written an excellent book, it will find a publisher. Alas, not necessarily. If this were true, there would not be any successful indie authors.
  
  
• Readers need publishers to tell them what to read. Curating is an important part of what publishers do. Readers are quite able to select the books they want to read, and have always done this. Now they have a bigger selection to choose from.
  
  
• Ebooks cost as much to produce and supply to the customer as print books. Yeah, right, course they do.

Have I missed anything?