You know this in your heart:  the kid has jumped the queue, rushed the line, punched his own ticket ahead of you, a hard-working writer who is playing by the rules.  For God's sakes, look at all the publicity he's getting! Who knows how many books he'll sell, but this is 21st century post-modern America, and who, anymore, really cares who the publisher is?  So why shouldn't you self-publish your novel?  You've work-shopped it, you've revised it, you've slaved over it for years.  It's ready.  The bastards in the New York publishing industry are all on the take, and too busy publishing their friends to bother with you, so now it's your turn. . . .  Why not self-publish?

For a whole bunch of reasons.  First, you haven't sold your novel or published your short stories because they're not good enough.  This has to be said, and I say it with the best of intentions.  Your writing is not quite "there", and it's up to you to understand where "there" is.   In other of my "On Writing" entries I talk some about that (style, structure, voice), and make that case that at some point (probably right now if you're thinking of self-publishing) you need to lay a page of your prose alongside a page of a writer you admire, one who speaks to you, and closely examine how his/her writing is different from yours.  This will take you back to the sentence level, where writing lives (and dies).  Some writers, nonfiction ones in particular–Joan Didion and John McPhee come to mind– could write about making the morning coffee and keep our interest, and that's solely because of their sentence style.  So take another look at your sentences.  Do they carry a reader continuously and energetically forward?  Do they have balance, rhythm?  Are they pleasing on the tongue (the mind has its own ear)?  Do they sound good read aloud?  Are their images fresh and precise--though not so much so as to draw undue attention at the expense of the paragraph?  There's no end to the ways to see your sentences and to make them better....

One last note:  I can assure you that there is no conspiracy out there to keep you from publishing.  The publishing industry is just that--a for-profit business.  Editors' jobs are on the line on a daily basis.  They need to find and work with writers who can sell books, and being kind to and publishing their writer friends is not going to do that.

In the end, I think writing and publishing is one of the purest forms of democracy out there.  If your writing is good, someone will take notice; if it's not ready, they won't.  If it's close, they'll tell you.   

Now get back to work.  You've spent enough time here