There was an interesting exchange on Twitter this morning. I retweeted a tweet from a talk by <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/MarshallBuckley" target="_blank">Marshall Buckley</a> who was listening a talk by the writer <a href="http://nicolamorgan.com/" target="_blank">Nicola Morgan</a>. It read,  'self pub mostly selling to other unpublished writers. That's great but unsustainable.'

Seemed an interesting comment. Certainly got some interesting responses. So is the current level of self pubbing unsustainable? Honest answer: no one knows. But there are questions to be asked. Here are some...

<strong>What happens when the material runs out. </strong>Let's be honest. A lot of the stuff going up there right now is old material. Backlist (some of mine there -- why wouldn't I?) Rejected manuscripts. Hastily-finished manuscripts seeking a new market. Nothing wrong with topping and tailing some old stuff and getting it into the system.

But that doesn't take long. What happens when the cupboard is bare and you have to write everything from scratch? Will you still manage to summon up the energy a year from now if the money's still just a trickle and the chances of a mainstream publishing contract seem no nearer?

<strong>Amanda Hocking. </strong>Is a great media story and totally atypical. What happened to Ms Hocking is unlikely to happen to any but a handful of people. Best to believe one of them will not be you. Oh, and Ms Hocking just signed a conventional pub deal too, which is very sensible of her in my view. Again... why wouldn't you?

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