“Why don’t you self-publish?”

It’s a question I get frequently when I bemoan the fact that I haven’t had a book published in five years, despite writing several that I (and my agent) think are good and worth publishing. [Full disclosure: I did put two e-books of unpublished manuscripts up on Amazon and basically forgot about them for years! One was a sequel to The Musician’s Daughter that readers kept asking me for, and that I’d written as the option book after TMD, but my editor wanted something different; the other was...