"if you want success in publishing, you must write what they want to buy." That's a super key point, and plays into arguments for and against both types of publishing. With self-publishing, you have 100% freedom to defy genres or markets as you like, whereas with traditional, the #1 concern (before quality, even) is whether you're writing within a marketable genre. So, if you have, say, a horror book, then you've chosen a very normal, mainstream, established genre. Agents want that because they can sell it. But if you took some fork from that--maybe you wrote the whole horror novel in verse or something--it becomes much more difficult to find an agent who'll know how to sell it. Ergo, I think the more a writer's work falls squarely within an established genre, the more he or she should strive for traditional over self-published. And vice versa... the more you've done something without precedent, the tougher it'll be to find an agent to represent it (and, therefore, going either straight to self-published or maybe a little less intent / insistent on traditional could be wise). But that's just one of many, many potential observations regarding this ongoing dilemma. I really do think that it's just super-duper hard to land an agent (which is another giant topic with a ton of nuances), and that alone is what drives a lot of quality writing to self-publish. One final note on self-publishing: It's *hugely* satisfying for some (me included) to finish a project (with all of the editing, hiring of an artist, etc. that goes into it) and be able to get it in print almost immediately. For the impatient, it's just an awesome rush to not have to wait forever to see the thing in print.