Writing.Com General Discussion

I haven't had experience with this myself, but what I've heard (from the writing excuses podcast and agent and editor interviews) is that there are authors who manage to self-pub and then sell the same book to traditional publishers afterwards, but usually these are books that did unusually well as self-pubbed without tapping out their potential market, and it happens rarely.

Most likely, self-pubbing going to work against you trad-publishing the book because a) some agent/editors just won't take something that's already published, and b) likely (especially from what you said yourself), your book won't sell well as a self-pub story and this will be a big turn of for any editors/agents that could've been interested.

So the general advice is to do one or the other for one particular novel.