how published / published how?

I'm cross posting this to FaceBook because I'm hoping to get some real feedback. All in all I think the huge jump in self publishing is a good thing, but at the moment it's a little bit like the wild west: lawless and unpredictable. There are self published books that are very good and that deserve to have found a traditional publisher, but there are also many, many pretty awful self published novels. Now here's the problem: It's my sense (and correct me if I'm wrong) that self-published people don't make a point of that in their bios or blurbs. So when I come across a blurb about another author that reads: author of x novels, or published x novels, I now have to stop to wonder about the how.  Are we talking Norton or Penguin or Tor, or is this Amazon self-publishing? Further complicating the matter, there are some trends I've noticed about self publishing on Amazon  that I don't know how to interpret. If a novel  out for less than a year (especially a romance novel) has 5,000+ comments and 96 percent of them are 5 stars, that novel is very likely to be self published, as far as I've been able to determine. I'm not sure what this means; I could make some guesses, but only guesses. At this point when I come across a new novel, again, especially on Amazon, there's no way to know if this novel is self published unless i go look at the details and dig deeper.  Of course, I'm free to do that or not; it's my loss if I pass up a good novel. So now, I find myself worrying about my own blurbs. If […]