PaulineMRoss
Inkling
There's a continuum along which self-published authors seem to fall. Some discrete points along the continuum:
1. You're happy enough putting out complete dreck, as long as you think you can make a few bucks off it;
I don't think anyone thinks they're putting out complete dreck. On the contrary, there are a lot of beginner authors who think they've written a masterpiece and are shocked at complaints about typos, poor grammar, cardboard characters, plot holes and the like. I've come across a LOT of self-pubbers who ended up pulling their early work or extensively revising, because they didn't have a clue at first. That's (in my view) the biggest problem with self-pubbing - that authors do their learning in public view.
But I don't think anyone in this forum falls into the 'complete dreck' category.
2. You're not going to publish something unless you're personally satisfied that it is top-notch quality and representative of your art, and you'd rather do that and sell less than do #1.
And on what criteria do you measure what is 'top-notch quality and representative of your art'? You can decide not to publish until a work meets your own quality standards, sure, but (as I mentioned in point 1, above) many authors are self-deluded about their own ability. Getting an outside opinion is better - whether by submitting to agents/publishers, or putting the work through a critique group or beta reading.
3. Somewhere in the middle, where you decide a certain minimum level of quality is necessary before you're comfortable putting a work out there, but at some point you hit a point where even if it could be better it's "good enough."
Again, how are you measuring 'better'? See, there's a law of diminishing returns. With a first draft, there's a huge amount of improvement possible, usually. By the time you get to a third or fourth draft, not so much. Each iteration makes less difference to the finished work. You can go on tinkering for ever, and some people do, and that's fine. But if you want to publish eventually, there comes a point where each incremental improvement is less and less visible to a reader. And if you have a commercial objective in mind (which, after all, is the point of this thread), then endlessly tinkering is not cost effective. There comes a point when the time invested in another editing pass won't be rewarded by greater sales. That's when you publish.