Mythopoet
Auror
But there is a stigma. I have personally heard people say "I never read self-published books, they're all crap." The thread on /r/writing on Reddit about Chuck Wendig's blog post had a couple of users completely dismissing all self-publishing (one was even accused on being a paid shill for the Big Five, so vehement was he that nothing good ever came of self-published works). It might be that there are people who prefer self-published books on the basis of how payment reaches the creator, but that doesn't negate that there is still a stigma.
As one of the commenters on the original article said, "The source of the stigma has nothing to do with anything about self-publishing, self-published books, or self-published writers. The stigma arises from the fact that self-publishing is a threat to legacy publishing. This happens in every industry transition caused by disruptive innovation. The incumbent industry leaders denigrate the quality of the goods and services produced by the innovation. They have to. It doesn’t matter how many great books get self-published or how few are total disasters. The people who benefit from the stigma will have some self-published books to point to that justify the stigma."
That commenter, who goes by the handle "William Ockham", is a regular over at the Passive Voice blog and is a very, very smart man. I think he's spot on here. I have yet to hear a regular reader, and by that I mean a reader who is not in any way connected to the publishing industry, just a casual reader, buy into the stigma. (And no, writers don't count. Book bloggers don't count.) I'm sure there are regular readers who do. But I suspect, based on what I've seen, that they are very few compared to the readers who just don't care how their book is published as long as its enjoyable. It's the industry that's bogged down by the stigma. (Though, of course, not so much that they won't jump through hoops to sign a contract with a best selling self publisher.)
And no, readers don't need any "experts" to curate their selection and tell them what a good book is. They know what they like and what they want and we have all kinds of tools nowadays to help us find what we're looking for.
And I think we do have the right to say "this is a bad book that should not have been published" when it opens with a poorly punctuated prologue describing the history of the novel's world using awkward sentence structures and sometimes even words that sound similar to, but mean the opposite of, the word they intended to use - and I have here in mind the sample of a novel about Nephilim or something that was discussed in the Chat a few months ago, which I am sure other members here will recall.
How we go about trying to improve self-publishing is one thing; but I think we are justified in making judgements, provided it is a minimum standard of quality we measure against, and not a subjective liking or disliking.
No, you have no such right. Unfortunately for you we live in a free market society. Publishers have the right to reject a book, but only because to publish a book they would be investing money and resources. But even when a publisher rejects a book it doesn't mean "this book shouldn't be published". It means no more and no less than "our company does not feel the potential sales of this book are worth the investment it would require".
Don't believe me? There are countless writers all over the internet with stories about how they got rejection notices from editors that said something along the lines of "I love this book! But the sales team said no". Great books are rejected all the time, not because they shouldn't be published, but because someone at the publishing company didn't think it would be a success. And of course, stories abound about famous books that went on to be huge getting rejected many times. (Harry Potter, for instance. Man, I bet the people who rejected that feel stupid. If they still have their jobs.)
And then there are all the books that, by certain standards, could arguable be called "crap" and yet are published and hugely successful. Twilight springs to mind. It has as many critics as it has fans. Should it not have been published? I dare you to suggest it shouldn't have been published to the people making millions off of it. All books have critics. And all books have fans. I've encountered just as many traditionally published books that I thought were crap as I have self-published books.
Sometimes I wish The Sword of Shannara had never been published, then copying Tolkien badly might never have become so popular. But it still remains that I have NO RIGHT to judge Shannara as a book that should never have been published. In doing so I deny countless readers the enjoyment they found in the Shannara books over the years and I'm also denying Terry Brooks his livelihood and success. I have NO RIGHT to do that.
In the end it's the author who decides whether to take the risk and put his work out in public and it's the readers who decide the work's fate. That's as it should be.