...should I write that which I feel to be good; or that which has the best chance of being published? (Still struggling with the basics here...!) I'm being rhetorical -- just thinking out loud. But would be interested to know what others think. Is publishing your sine qua non? Even if you don't like what you are producing, does getting published make it worthwhile? Or is it better to produce what you think is right even if nobody else likes it?
I suspect this has been discussed ad infinitum in previous posts, apologies if I am being boring.
You are right to be considering this Marc. Ultimately writing for profit is a job.
If you want to write not-for-profit then do whatever you enjoy doing and publish by whichever non-commercial means you prefer - within limits of course. It can be as extreme as you like, uncommercial as you like, it can be as poor as you like. It is up to you because it is actually a hobby.
If you want to write for-profit, i.e. for it to be a job paying you an income, then like any job you will spend many days, months even, doing things you don't particularly like or enjoy. There as mornings I get up for work and don't feel like going in, but I want to work so I do it. Quite frankly, I also need to work to earn a living because I wasn't born wealthy. For a writer in today's commercial publishing world your 'job' entails self-marketing, giving talks, going to meetings, answering queries, considering contracts and endless other tasks which you may not particularly enjoy and which may even stall your writing for quite a while.
Being involved in a local writers' group I get to see and hear these issues regularly, which is why I have drawn the conclusions above. The majority of it's members have opted for self-publishing. Two members have published commercially. One of those admits he 'can't be bothered' to market his work and admits that this has seriously impacted sales - he does not have a literary agent as far as I am aware. The other writes children's books and has just had his last MS turned down by his agent and publisher - he wants to write a different kind of story to his previous work apparently, but it has not gone well. So you see there a microcosm of writing for profit and the reality of what the book buying public want. You notice I said what the book buying public want, because ultimately it is the readers who are calling the shots not you or anyone else. If they buy your book by the tens of millions (mentioning no names) then they are demonstrating reader power. But at any time readers can decide you are out of fashion and buy someone else's work. It is up to them what they buy. And no one in the publishing industry
has a clue what the next big thing is so they can't tell you where readers will go next.
So it's up to you Marc. You decide.