As Minister of Science and Defender of the Faith, I exhort you to heed the Lawgiver and follow the traditional, conventional path to publishing. Preserve a way of life that has served us well for hundreds of years. Do not listen to that self-publisher, William Blake. The self-publisher should be shunned and driven out, if not destroyed outright. Beware the beastly self-publisher, for they are the Print-on-Demand publisher's pawn. Alone among the creative creed, they write for vanity or arrogance or impatience. Yea, they will murder art to publish their art. Let them not publish in great numbers, for they will make a desert of the literary canon. Shun them; drive them back into their unpublished lair, for they are the harbinger of mediocrity.

The publishing house, rooted in the past, preserves the established canon of literature. Self-publish and you won't like what you find.

Your book will reside in print-on-demand purgatory as a data record in the catalogs of online booksellers like Amazon. A few local stores might carry a few copies that you paid to have printed yourself, but no major brick and mortar chain will put it on their shelves. It sits in the system unknown to the world, since the only marketing was a press release distributed electronically. You wrote, and they did not come. You have earned no money and no accolades. Your work consigned to oblivion.