Can we discuss pros and cons?

You've missed the most important thing a publisher provides, editing. The best marketing machine in the world can't sell a weak book. You preferably want to be edited by someone with a stake in your book, and who talks with marketing. Which makes it quite handy that this is provided by the publisher.

I don't think the basic issues are much different from 1o years ago. With LSI it is difficult, but not impossible, to make the book discounted and retunrable to allow proper distribution.

Promotion and marketing x distrubution and brand image = sales.

Personally I think traditional presses still do a lot of marketing for their titles, on the whole--and they certainly are in charge of distribution and branding (especially important for romance). Even being with very small presses allow me to sell around a thousand copies per title without really doing any marketing at all. Very few self-publishers could say the same.

So the 'authors have to promote regardless' argument is true-ish on one level, but not directly related to how promotion translates into sales.

"Traditional" is a meaningless term in this context, and all the more so after having been adopted by notorious vanity press PublishAmerica for itself.

Even commercial publishing has many varieties. The key issues are to whom does the publishing company direct its sales (if to the author, it is a vanity press or subsidy press -- but even if to readers, there is much variation in audience), and what roles does it play in the process and what roles does it expect the author to play in the process.

FWIW, my booklet (linked in sig. block below) gives a useful (and mercifully concise) overview, plus annotated list of references and resources. Free. No gimmicks. I wrote it to help uninformed writers to have some starting points and to avoid serious errors.

--Ken

Having done the off-set press self-publishing and the small-press publisher, I can attest that they're not the same as the NYC/traditional publisher in several respects other than cost.

1. Distribution: While anyone can list a book on Amazon and the other web-based seller, distributors to brick & morter stores aren't as open to self or small press publishers, especially the larger chains that do the majority of the business in books. I worked for a small press New Age publisher and he had been in business for over a decade, applying for distribution from Ingrams for over half of that time, before he finally got a probationary contract with them.

Yes, his sales did increase after that. Notably.

Bookstores will require full payment on a special order book from a self or small press publisher and the vast majority of customers are not willing to do that on an unknown author they don't personally know.

2. Cover art: Besides cost, there's also quality of the artwork for the cover, which affects sales. The bigger the publisher, the better the quality of the artwork. Sure, anyone can use Poser or any other program to create something, but few have the talent to create really GOOD artwork that book buyers take for granted and fully expect. Bigger publishers also have the equipment to reproduce that artwork better. It does make a difference.

The small press publisher who published my book in 1999 released the first book with images photoshopped (almost typed photochopped) together--images that were found on the web and used without copyright permission. I strongly suspect this is one of the reasons the publisher went out of business 3 months after my book was released. (FWIW, I hired a professional artist friend to create my cover and the publisher was unable to reproduce it properly, leaving off 1/3 of the design).

3. Writer's resume. Publish something with a NYC/traditional publisher, and you've got bragging rights when searching for a (new) agent, when shopping other books, when talking to other authors. It qualifies you to join professional writer's groups, if you so desire. You get none of those bennies when you self/small press publish--unless you manage to one of the rare people who sell into the five-six figures with a single book in a reasonable amount of time.

4. Free time to write the next book. IMHO, the most important aspect. Self-promotion eats up tons of time and energy. If you're someone who wants to write as a career, you want to write more than one book. When are you going to have the time and energy to be creative when you've got to spend so much hawking the first one?

Having worked on both sides of the publishing equation--as an editor and a writer--I have to disagree with the OP's statement that "all the work is left to the author". This just isn't true: it's a myth perpetuated by vanity presses and miniscule POD presses who attempt to make their services look better by making the more legitimate routes into publishing look worse.

It's very difficult for self-published authors to get proper distribution. Very difficult indeed. It's also very difficult for them to get reviewed in the most useful publications, as many of them simply won't consider self-published titles; and promotion is much harder with only one person behind it. Then there's the cost of doing things well: it's all very well to operate on a shoe-string, but if you're not incredibly talented that lack of funding is going to be obvious in the quality--or lack of it--in your production values.

In my direct experience (I review self-published books on one of my blogs) very few self-published books are subjected to a proper copy-edit, let alone a decent structural edit. The typesetting on most of the ones I've seen has been poor to non-existent; the design is equally bad. This means that if you are going to do it well you're going to stand way out from the crowd; but surely everyone who self-publishes think that they're going to do better than the average person?

So, what I'm saying is that there's a huge amount of work involved in publishing if you want to do it properly. And a lot of that work is costly. Self-publishing can be a brilliant choice if you have the skills and the cash to make it work. If you don't--then you might well be better off not doing it at all.