"Every Time You Publish You Are Changing Someone's Life"

I completely love this post from Brendan Gannon, where he talks about an unremarkable anthology called 50 Short Science Fiction Tales and the disproportionately long shadow it's cast in his life:

[... My] taste in sci-fi has been defined by those 50 short stories. My view of the entire genre is filtered through some pulp stories two guys threw together fifty years ago. Not because I haven't read other sci-fi, but because, for lack of other books, I read 50 Short Science Fiction Tales so many freaking times. Recently I wrote my first short science fiction story, and it could pass for one of the stories in this book.

God, you're thinking, Brendan sure likes to talk about himself. You're right, but I also have a point. Your book could be someone else's 50 Short Science Fiction Tales. Any book could be. Right now, there are people at summer camps looking for something to read. People picking up mass markets paperbacks in bus stations. Bored kids on summer vacation, miles from the nearest bookstore and broke besides. They don't care whether a book was tossed off quickly for the advance or was slaved over for years by a passionate author. They don't care when the book was published or what the reviewers said. For lack of anything better, they are about to give their undivided attention to some random paperback.

Right now if you self-publish you're going to put in a lot of sweat and tears and your book will be awash in a sea of questionable quality. If you get a traditional book deal, your advance will probably be smaller than it would have been a few years ago, and the shelf space on which your book will appear shrinks every month. In other words, there are lots of challenges to face. But ebooks are forever. You never know when something you published will change someone's life. You never know when something you published might get discovered by the perfect fans and become a commercial success. You might never know at all: Theodore Sturgeon will probably never know that he helped shape my taste in reading and writing. But remember, when you look over disappointing sales figures and reflect on the immense challenge of marketing on your own work, that every time you publish you are changing someone's life.

– The Long Reach of the Book | Brendan Gannon.