Self-publishing your book is extremely amateurish.

And trust me. I KNOW traditional publishing can be so greedy and evil. But expecting a reader or anyone else to take you seriously when you self-published (and usually self-edited) a book with a horrible, janky self-designed cover is a huge ask.

When I find authors online and see an Amazon link to their self-published book, I see the same high school-level writing quality in every single "look inside" preview, and it's impossible for me to see them as legit.

I feel that writing a book is way too massive of an effort to just throw away on self-publishing.